LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Chap.. !>yri2rht No. 

ShelL 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 

I i 



% 



"" THE LIFE THAT REALLY IS 



BY/ 

LYMAN ABBOTT 



That they may lay hold on that which is really life. 

I Tim. vi. 19, Alford's Translation. 



NEW YORK 

WILBUR B. KETCHAM 

7 AND 9 West Eighteenth St. 
t 



O.'^^'^j 



THE U»M»YJ: 
or CO MORES* 

L!^flHlNGTOM 



TWO COPIES RECEiVEO, 

Library of Coii^rct% 
OfffcQ of the 

JAN 1 1 1900 

Register of CopyM£;ht«t 



50937 

Copyright, 1899, 

BY 

LYMAN ABBOTT. 



SECOND COPY. 






PREFACE. 

During the last year of my pastorate in Plymouth Church 
a pamphlet edition. of the morning sermons was issued, at 
the request and mainly for the use of members of the con- 
gregation, and subsequently about one hundred were bound 
in a volume bearing the title " The Life that Really Is/' The 
demand for that volume has led to the publication of this 
one, which, though it bear the same title, differs from its 
predecessor. Three sermons dealing with current events, 
and necessarily temporary in their character, have been 
omitted and others including the last sermon I preached 
in Plymouth Pulpit, have been inserted in their stead. The 
title, " The Life that Really Is," has been selected, not 
because it chances to be the title of one of the sermons, but 
because it expresses what I believe ought to be one of the 
chief aims of the preacher, namely, to bring the light of the 
eternal, the spiritual, the ever present and ever real life to 
bear upon all the problems of the temporal, the earthly and 
the apparent. It is because I hope that these sermons 
may do something to minister to the '^ Life that Really Is *' 
in those who may read them, that I gladly accede to the 
request for their publication. 

It should perhaps be added that, like all my sermons, these 
were delivered extemporaneously. I have made no attempt 
to rewrite or recast them, or indeed to do anything more 
than secure as nearly as possible the reproduction of the 
sermons as originally delivered, simply eliminating such 
palpable infelicities of phraseology as are generally incidental 
to extemporaneous discourse. 

LYMAN ABBOTT. 



CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER PAGB 

I. " The Life that really is " 7 

II. The Secret and the Revealed Things 16 

III. The Christian Life 28 

IV. The Hope That is in Me 41 

V. The Secret of Character 55 

VI. Help Thou Mine Unbelief 66 

VII. Hinduism Versus Christianity 78 

VIII. The Christian Brotherhood 89 

IX. To Live is Christ 102 

X. The New Versus the Old Theology iii 

XL The Use and Abuse of God's Gifts 123 

XII. Joy is in Service 137 

XIII. An Easter Message 149 

XIV. A Godless Life is a Hopeless Life 160 

XV. What is Religion ? 173 

XVI. The Creed : a Test not a Testimony 184 

XVII. The Door of Opportunity 195 

XVIII. " Our Leader " 206 

XIX. Our Citizenship 217 

XX. " Children of God " 229 

XXI. Saved by Hope 240 

XXII. The Living God 252 

XXIII. Out of the Past 267 

XXIV. Unconscious Following of Christ 279 

XXV. Paul's Gospel for America 291 

XXVI. A Confession of Faith 306 



«*THE LIFE THAT REALLY IS." 

" That they may lay hold on the life which is life indeed^'* 

/. Timothy ^vi, 19 {Rev. version^ 

The great mass of men act as though they believed, or a 
large part of their time they act, as though they believed, that 
the life, which is seen is the life indeed. The material, vis- 
ible life, this is to them the real, the actual life ; and the 
other, the life of faith, of emotion, of imagination, of senti- 
ment, this is the unreal life, the visionary life ; this belongs, 
not to the practical men, but to the sentimentalists and the 
visionaries. And so men say, it is all very well to talk about 
character, about generosity and honesty and virtue, but the 
great thing is to succeed ; and, by success, they mean hav- 
ing so much money in the bank, so much real estate, so 
much power in commercial circles. Enthusiasm and 
patriotism and high principle are all very well, but if you 
are going to succeed in politics you must understand the 
machine, and must know how to run with it, that is the 
way to succeed, that is the life that is life indeed — the prac- 
tical politician's life. They say, in art and literature, the 
age of romanticism has passed, that it belongs to a bygone 
age, that we have come to the age of realism. What we want 
the novelist to do, is to portray to us life that is life indeed ; 
and by that we mean, not the life of heroism, not any 
form of idealism, but life as it is seen in the common affairs 
by prosaic men ; they want photographs, not art. And so, 
7 



8 '' THE LIFE THAT REALLY IS." 

in religion, men are afraid if anything attacks the outside, 
the symbol, the visible thing ; they are afraid if the ritual is 
disturbed, or the creed, or the Book is inquired into, for 
these things seem to them the life indeed ; the real life is 
the ritual and the creed and the Bible. As to the Word 
of God behind the Bible, they do not understand what that 
means ; as to the faith that cannot be put into the creed, 
they shake their heads over that ; as to the worship that 
has no visible expression, they are very doubtful about that ; 
the life that is real life seems to them to be what the phi- 
losophers call an objective life — something that you can see. 

Now, Paul's view is always the reverse of this ; to him 
the real life, the life that really is, the life that is life indeed, 
is the invisible life. And this morning I want to tell you 
this again : that the only life, the real life, the life that is 
life indeed, transcends the sensuous and the visible. 

It is so in literature. If it is true that we have passed 
from romanticism into realism, if the drama has nothing to 
do and the novelist nothing and the poet nothing but to 
take photographs, then we have bidden good-by to the 
days of literature. Literature is something higher and nobler 
and better than photographing society. Literature is life, 
and the author of literature is, first of all, a man who is able 
to see life. Not merely the life of the hand, or of the foot, 
but the invisible life, the interior life from which all the 
outward activities spring. The poet is one who can see 
that and portray it and make us see it, and by portraying it 
and making us see it can make us share it. Real liter- 
ature is ideal literature. It is the portrayal, not of the 
things that every man can see, not of the common conver- 
sations you can hear in the horse-cars, or the common 
gossip you can talk over at tea-tables, it is the portrayal of 
the life that lies behind all visible life, that is nobler and 
diviner than that which most men see, and such portrayal 



'' THE LIFE THAT REALLY IS/' 9 

of it as stirs men's hearts and makes them see it also. This 
is the only literature which lasts. The issues of the daily 
journals are counted by the millions. So are the autumn 
leaves that fall and are trodden under foot and turned into 
soil again. But the literature that lasts, the literature that 
is truly classical, is the literature that looks behind the mask 
that men wear, and sees behind the mask the living man. 
It is the literature of a Homer, who shows the courage of the 
hero and the patient fidelity of the wife ; it is the literature 
of a Dante, who sees the sins and iniquities of humanity, 
and makes you behold them shadowed on the mystic curtain 
of the other world ; the literature of a Shakespeare, who en- 
ables us to understand the ambition which lets, " I dared 
not wait upon I would," or the passionate love that is easily 
turned into passionate jealousy; it is the literature of a 
Tennyson, who portrays a soul wrestling with the problem, 
is this all, or is there a life yet to come ; it is the literature 
of a Browning, who shows us God in the poorest and the com- 
monest of men. It shows the homely virtues triumphing in 
quiet lives. These are the classics. They are not the books 
that photograph society^ they are not tea-table talk, they 
portray the innermost life of the noblest men made so clear 
that we can see them. If you want to be quieted read 
Trollope ; if you want to be stirred to action read Shakes- 
peare. 

The highest art has to do with the life that is life indeed. 
The imitator is not an artist. A man who can simply por- 
tray a falling leaf or a silk dress, so that you almost take it 
for reaUty, is a skilled artisan and nothing more. Unless 
behind the tree he sees something, unless in the woman 
whose dress he portrays he beholds a life, and unless he en- 
ables us to see that life in nature and that life in womankind, 
he is no artist. ^^ Art for art's sake," what does that mean? 
If it means that the greatest artist does not paint his pictures 



10 ''THE LIFE THAT REALLY IS. 

that he may sell them, that he does not even paint them that 
he may teach a lesson and preach a sermon, if it means that 
all the noblest art is the spontaneous expression of the life of 
the artist, it is true. All the noblest work is spontaneous : the 
love of the mother ; the singing of the bird ; the service of 
the father ; the courage of the soldier, and the work of the 
artist with his palette and his brush. Art, if it be true and 
noble and divine, is spontaneous, but the value of the work 
depends upon the life which gives it forth. Art is the ex- 
pression of life? Yes; but it is only high art in case it is 
the expression of a divine and an ennobling life. AVhat 
are the pictures that live ? Not those that merely tickle the 
eye with color, that appeal to the baser passions of men, 
their sensuality and lust. These are seen for a few days, 
weeks, months, in the picture gallery^ and then go to the 
lumber room of the past ; it is Raphael, so painting divine 
motherhood as to stir a diviner mother love in every woman 
who looks upon the picture ; it is Michael Angelo, so por- 
traying the day of judgment as to bring the splendid glory 
of the future life into our own ; it is a Tissot, turning aside 
from picturing the woman of Paris in all her various phases 
of life and going for eight or ten years to Palestine, and 
coming back with his three hundred pictures, bringing the 
Christ down here to the nineteenth century and enabling us 
to understand what Dr. Van Dyke has well called ''the 
human life of God." These are the pictures that live — the 
pictures that spring from a life within and stir the life of 
other men within. 

And so of music. Music may be prostituted to sensuous 
purposes, either in the ball-room or in the revival meeting. 
But the music that lasts is neither the jingling melody of 
the one nor the more stirring, and yet more temporary, 
melody of the other. Music is the interpretation of a life 
which never can be interpreted in any other way. If the 



'' THE LIFE THAT REALLY IS. 1 1 

printed program tells you what the music means — shep- 
herds dancing, birds singing, thunder rolling, soldiers march- 
ing — you have second-class music. A piece of music 
which can be put into words is always a second quality of 
music; the music which lasts is the music which springs 
from a life that cannot find expression in words, and stirs a 
life that transcends all that the eye has seen, all that the 
ear has heard, all that the heart of man has conceived, all 
that the tongue has spoken. It is the music of a Bach or 
a Handel, uttering the praise of generations ; it is the music 
of a Schumann interpreting the woes and the perplexities of 
the age in the presence of the Great Mystery that ever sur- 
rounds us ; it is the music of a Wagner stirring us with 
human passion of love and hope and fear to its uttermost ; 
it is the music of a Beethoven — and what is that? Ah, who 
can tell what is the music of a Beethoven? 

In politics the life that is life indeed is not the life of 
office-seeking and office-getting and machine-manipulating 
and vote canvassing. It is not the man who has been work- 
ing with the machine and for the machine, manipulating 
votes and contriving politics, it is the man who has been in- 
dependent and courageous and brave and self-forgetful and 
serving his country — he is the man who becomes Governor 
of the state. How many men are there in this congrega- 
tion to whom Lord North is anything but a name ? For 
twelve years Prime Minister of England, ruling an empire, 
successful politician, while Burke was without office and 
Chatham was dead ; but a man must be fairly well versed 
in history to know anything more about him than his name, 
and the utterances of Burke and Chatham flow down the 
stream of life, and wherever they go, life is better. Who 
knows the names of the shrewd politicians in the time of 
the Revolution? Who will ever forget the names of Jeffer- 
son and of Hamilton and of Washington? Who, except 



12 "THE LIFE THAT REALLY IS. 

those who lived in the time immediately preceding the Civil 
War, can recall the names of the skilful, shrewd, wire-pull- 
ing, designing politicians in the compromise with slavery ; 
and who in American history will ever forget the names of 
Abraham Lincoln and Seward and Sumner and Chase ? 
The men who believed in the life which is life indeed, the 
men who took their stand on principles, the men who be- 
lieved that God was behind a principle, the men who dared 
to suffer and to die for principle, they are the men who 
live forever, their life is immortal, and the other succeeds 
to-day and is buried in oblivion to-morrow. 

The greatness of a nation depends on its interior life. 
Not on the size of its territory ; not on the number of its 
people ; not on its great highways, binding the people to- 
gether in one great nation ; not on the plentitude of its 
arts ; not on the largeness of its wealth. You may almost 
say that the little nations have been the great ones in hu- 
man history, and the big nations have been the little ones. 
Persia was a big nation and Greece was a great one. Russia 
is a big nation and Great Britain is a great one. There is 
something splendid in the history of that little people on 
those little islands, surrounded by the sea ; that little people 
with their enterprise, their courage, their honesty, their 
sturdiness of purpose, in spite of angularity, in spite of lack 
of tact, in spite of brusqueness of behavior, in spite of hard- 
ness of dealings sometimes with subject races, none the less 
a nation of enterprise, of energy, of indomitable courage, 
whose flag has dared the Northern seas and the Southern 
seas, the East and the West, whose men have gone every 
whither, and wherever they have gone have carried the 
higher civilization with them. And what will make America 
great? More territory? What is the difference between the 
American of 1900 and the America of 1600? In 1600 the 
same fertile prairies, the same boundless forests, the same 



"THE LIFE THAT REALLY IS.'* 1 3 

great lakes, the same mill streams ready to be harnessed to 
industry, the same mountains full of silver and gold and 
copper and iron and coal, and three hundred thousand 
Indians roaming over it ; to-day supporting seventy millions 
of, on the whole, peaceful and prosperous people. What is 
the difference? The life which is life indeed. The dif- 
ference is the difference in men. The difference between 
an Indian and an American is not that one lives in a tepee 
and the other in a house, but that one is willing to live in a 
tepee and the other is determined to live in a house. It is 
character. It is an old, old story, but we often live as 
if we thought it was not true. 

( And so in religion, the life that really is, the life that is 
life indeed, that is the only thing. Other things may min- 
ister to it, may express it, may utter it, but life lies back of 
them all. It is not the ritual, it is the spirit of reverence, 
it is not the creed, it is the spirit of faith. It is not the 
book, it is the living God in the hearts of living men whose 
utterances are interpreted in the book. It is not the book 
that is sacred, but God in the hearts of men ; not the creed 
that is sacred, but the faith of God, of which the creed may 
or may not be an exponent ; not the ritual that is sacred, 
but the spirit of love and adoration and reverence which 
the ritual attempts to express; and if that reverence is 
really there, it is a matter of no concern whatever whether 
it be expressed before an altar with a swinging incense, or 
be expressed by a vested choir and a listening congrega- 
tion, or, as here in Plymouth, by the great congregation 
uniting their voices in one great song of praise, or as in the 
Quaker meeting-house — not expressed at all. It is the life, 
the life that really is, the life of reverence and faith and 
hope and love that makes religion, and those other things 
are either the expression of it, or the promotion of it, or tlie 
hindrances and the manacles upon it. 



14 ''THE LIFE THAT REALLY IS.*' 

What is your life — real or false? What is your life? 
Booker T. Washington told us last Thursday night that the 
first thing the negro wanted was property and education. 
This struggling, scheming, elbow-shoving and pushing pop- 
ulation of ours after property, is it all bad? No, a great 
deal of it is very good ; because property is either a power 
which the life that really is can use, or the symbol and ex- 
pression of the life that really is which has produced it. 
For the most part men of property — in this country, at all 
events — are men who possess industry, economy and tem- 
perance, the threefold virtue which makes what we call 
thrift j and the value is not in the bank accounts, it is not 
in the real estate, it is in the economy, the industry and 
the temperance. A young man flings himself off the wharf 
and rescues a drowning man, does it again and again, and 
by and by the Life-saving Service pins some emblem of 
honor on his breast. The value is not the thing which is 
pinned upon his breast. The value is the courage and the 
self-denial and the service which he has done. A boy goes 
into the army; enters as a sergeant, comes back with 
epaulets on his shoulders. There is nothing in the epau- 
lets ; there is everything in the courage, the heroism, the 
patience, the bravery that won the epaulets. Wealth is 
an instrument which may minister to the life that really is. 
Wealth may be the symbol which shows that the man has 
possessed the life that really is ; but the life is everything ; 
the economy, the temperance, the industry — the thrift, in 
one word — the spirit of self-denial for a higher end. What 
is your life ? What is your home ? What are your politics ? 
What is literature to you, and art to you, and the Bible to 
you? These are nothing in themselves, save as they min- 
ister to that life which is life indeed, that life which never 
can be taken from us, that life which is immortal because 
it is God's own life in the souls of men. 



"THE LIFE THAT REALLY IS/* 1 5 

Inspire us, Thou Lifegiver, with the life that really is, 
that we may be no shadows pursuing shadows, but true men 
and true women, learning in Thy school, inspired by Thy 
Spirit, growing into Thy likeness. For Christ's sake. 
Amen. 



THE SECRET AND THE REVEALED THINGS. 

" The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things 

which are revealed belong unto us^ and to our children for ever^ that 

we may do all the words of this law,^^ 

(Deuteronomy^ xxix. 29.) 

There are some things respecting which we ought to be 
agnostics. They are the secret things which belong to 
God. There are other things concerning which we ought 
not to be agnostics. They are the revealed things which 
belong to us and to our children. They belong to us, in 
order that we may do righteously. This statement, that 
they belong to us that we may do righteously, indicates the 
dividing line between the things that may be known and 
the things that may not be known. The things which con- 
cern us, which touch our life, lie within the realm of our 
knowledge ; the things which do not touch us, which do not 
concern our life, concerning which we may hold one theory 
or another theory, and our life still remain right, do not 
belong to us. We may discuss them, but they are not a 
part of the vital truths of religion. 

This is recognized as true, even in the material realm. 
No philosopher will undertake to tell us what matter is. He 
only knows what are the effects of matter. He knows that 
it is hard or soft ; that it is black or white ; that it has 
shape and contour ; but what it is in its essence, he does 
not know. I believe the latest theory (though it is pretty 

16 



THE SECRET AND THE REVEALED THINGS. 1 7 

hard to tell what is the latest theory in philosophy or 
science), I believe the latest theory is that matter is simply 
a form of force. It does not differ from other forces. To 
use the philosophical phrase, we do not know the nou- 
menon, we only know the phenomena. We only know that 
which is manifest, and that there is always something back 
of that which is manifest. We talk learnedly about attrac- 
tion of gravitation, but no one knows what it is which draws 
the apple from the tree. We talk learnedly about elec- 
tricity, but I believe no one knows what electricity is. Is it 
force? Is it matter? Is there any difference between 
force and matter? We do not know. We do not know 
what light is. We know what the effects of light are. 
And we have concluded that there is an ether which per- 
vades all space, and the waves of which produce what we 
call light, but we do not know that there is such ether. It 
is a purely hypothetical ether. No one ever saw it ; no 
one ever had any tangible and direct evidence of it. It is 
the unknown and the unknowable. 

In a similar manner, there is the known and the un- 
known in religion. And the difficulty about religious dis- 
cussion has been that most of it has been fighting about the 
unknown. We have battled about the things we did not 
know about ; much as if the scientists, instead of consider- 
ing how they can use electricity to light us, to carry us, and 
to do our errands for us, should get into hot controversy as 
to whether it is matter or force, and excommunicate one 
another, because one thought it was matter and another 
thought it was force ; or as if the doctors, instead of con- 
sidering how they can promote health and how they can 
cure disease and conquer death, should get into a hot dis- 
cussion about what is the nature of life and what is the 
nature of death. 

*' Nothing is more certain,*^ says Herbert Spencer, "than 
2 



1 8 THE SECRET AND THE REVEALED THINGS. 

that we are ever in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal 
Energy from which all things proceed.'* Now what can we 
know about that Infinite and Eternal Energy? We say 
that He is omnipresent. What do we mean ? Do we mean 
that God is equally everywhere ? Is He ? We think that 
the brain is the seat of the mind. The man is, as it were, 
localized in his brain. Is God localized somewhere in the 
center of the universe, or is He unlocalized, existing every- 
where equally? A very interesting question to discuss. A 
hone on which you can sharpen your razor. But we do not 
know. All that we do know is that everywhere in the uni- 
verse He is operative. That is all we know. But whether 
there may be or may not be some central throne whereon 
He sits in light, unapproachable, we do not know. One 
may say yes, and another may say no, and neither really 
know the better than the other. We say that He is omni- 
potent. What do we mean? Can He do all things? Can 
He make two and two five ? Can He make wrong right 
and right wrong ? There is a theory that the laws of math- 
ematics are simply the limitations of our own mind. There 
is a theory that the laws of mathematics are essential and 
eternal. To us they are essential ; and that is all we know, 
Omnipotence means that all the power there is, is subject to 
Him and He is the fountain and source of it. But it does 
not mean that there are no limits to power. We say that He 
is Creator. What do we mean ? Do we mean that matter 
is not eternal, that once there was no matter, and God spake, 
and then matter came into existence ? We do not know 
what matter is. How do we know whether He made it, 
or whether it existed from eternity and He has fashioned 
it into order out of chaos ? We do not know ; we can- 
not know. These things that concern the essence of the 
Divine, we do not know ; they are the secret things which 
do not belong to us. 



THE SECRET AND THE REVEALED THINGS. 1 9 

But wherever God comes in touch with us, we do know. 
We know that there is a natural order in the universe ; we 
know that there is somewhere a rule ; and we know that 
these rules are absolute, unchangeable, immutable. We know 
that they cannot be diverted or turned aside. Did He make 
them ? We do not know. But they are, and they are 
directed to intelligent ends. That we know. We know 
that there is a physical ruler, and a physical rule in the 
universe. And as there is a physical law in the universe, 
so there is a moral order in the universe. It is ; we do not 
create. It is, so far as we are concerned, eternal. It al- 
ways has been ; it always will be. There is a moral Gov- 
ernor and a moral government. We recognize this more 
and more. The progress of human thought is not toward 
chaos. Men once thought that there was no physical order, 
that there were as many gods as phenomena ; gradually 
they came to see that all physical laws are from one Law- 
giver. Once they thought there was no moral order, or 
scarcely recognized it. Now we are coming more and more 
to see that there is a moral order in the universe. More 
than that, we are coming to see, through evolution, that 
this moral order and this physical order make for progress. 
It tends to make every day better than the one that went 
before, and every year better than the year that went be- 
fore, and every epoch better than the epoch that went be- 
fore. We know that there is physical order, and a moral 
order, and that order means progress. We do not need to 
have a Bible for that ; we simply have to use the eyes in our 
heads and the brains behind the eyes. 

How has this God revealed Himself ? Paul says He has 
not left Himself without a witness in any land. How do 
these witnesses differ? He was a witness in Socrates, in 
Buddha, in every noble and true life, in every land and in 
every epoch ; He is a witness of Himself in nature, and He 



20 THE SECRET AND THE REVEALED THINGS. 

is a witness of Himself in the Bible. How do these wit- 
nesses differ ? How does inspiration differ from genius ? 
How does the inspiration of the olden time differ from the 
inspiration of the present time ? How does the inspiration 
of Egypt differ from the inspiration of Pagan lands ? Do 
you know what inspiration is ? Do you know what genius 
is ? There was once upon a time a man named William 
Shakespeare who WTOte in England, and a man named 
Martin Farquhar Tupper who wrote in England, and you 
know the difference between their writings ; but can you 
know what is the difference in the structure or size of their 
brains, which made one write as the one wrote, and the 
other write as the other wrote ? You do not know what 
genius is ; you do not know what inspiration is. We do 
not know in what way God operates on the mind. We do 
not know in what way God operated on the mind of 
Socrates ; nor in what way God operated on the mind of 
Paul. How can we tell what is the difference of the 
method of operation on one mind and on another ? We 
can know the difference in product, but we cannot know 
the difference in process. I defy the most skilful botanist 
to tell why it is that the peach stone brings forth the peach 
tree, and the apple seed the apple tree, planted in the same 
ground, rained upon by the same rain, shone upon by the 
same sun ; but you know the difference between the peach 
and the apple. Now, there never was a book which has 
produced the effect in the world that the Bible has produced 
— never ; never a book which has carried the comfort that 
has carried to the sorrowing one, the inspiration that has 
carried to the downcast one, uplifting those that were fallen 
under the power of temptation and sin, having power to give 
vigor to those who were paralyzed, and to open the ears of 
those deaf to spiritual truth. And it still has power. If you 
were to have a map pf the world hung up here at my side 



THE SECRET AND THE REVEALED THINGS. 21 

with the countries where there is no civilization colored 
black j and where a little civilization, there brown ; and 
where more civilization, a lighter brown ; and where the 
highest civilization, clear white ; you would find this to be 
true — just in the ratio in which the open Bible has gone, 
just in that ratio the civilization has gone. Where there 
has been no Bible, there has been no civilization — in India, 
in China, in Africa, where there has been no Bible, no com- 
mercial system, no credit system, no post-office system, no 
bank system, no railroad, no printing press, none of those 
things that make even for physical comfort in life. And 
then you come to Spain or to Russia, and there the Bible 
half open, and the country half light and half dark. Then 
you come to Protestant America, which we all think is first 
in civilization, and Protestant England, and there the Bible 
open and every man free to read it. We can tell what the 
Bible has done for the world, and we can tell what the 
Bible is doing for the world ; and if you will take it and 
use it, you can find out what it can do for you. When you 
get back into the question whether God dictated it, or God 
inspired it, but only in theological and religious matters, or 
whether and how far the Divine was intermixed with the 
human ; when you get into those questions, you get into 
what belongs to the secret processes. You can no more 
tell how God operates on a human mind than you can tell 
how God operates on a planted seed. 

There has been a great deal of discussion in the Church 
respecting the person of Christ, and the result of it has been 
the discussion of the question : " What is the relation of 
/Jesus Christ to the Eternal and Infinite Father? Some 
have said, respecting Father, Son, and Spirit, that there 
were three persons with three separate consciousnesses, but 
with one will ; and others have said : No, there was only 
one person with three manifestations, and they were eternal 



22 THE SECRET AND THE REVEALED THINGS. 

manifestations, and they always manifested themselves in 
those three ways ; and others have said : There was one 
person and one eternal manifestation, but three manifesta- 
tions in time — the Father, Son and Holy Spirit — so far as 
this globe is concerned and in this time. And men have 
fenced with one another — and they used not foils either ; 
they fenced with swords that drew blood — on questions 
respecting which neither of them knew anything. We do 
not know ; we cannot know the relation of Father, Son and 
Spirit to each other. That is one of the secret things which 
does not belong to us. 

But we do know Christ's relation to us; and that is 
enough for us to know. We can know that Christ is the 
typical man. We can see Him in history, the type, not of 
any profession or any class or any age ; not the typical 
Gentile, not the typical Jew, not the typical rich man, not 
the typical poor man, not the typical wise man ; alike for 
Oriental and Occidental, for wise man and unwise man, 
for rich man and poor man, for first century man and nine- 
teenth century man, for philosopher, for merchant, for 
statesman, for soldier, for man and for woman. Christ 
gave the world new virtues. Meekness was counted a 
vice when He came to the world, and it has become a 
virtue; patience was counted a vice when He came to 
the world, and it is a virtue. If He did not create new 
virtues, at all events He manifested them, and enabled us 
to see them. Are any of you amateur photographers, 
and have you ever taken your plate into a dark room 
and looked at it? There was nothing. And then you 
put the acid upon it, and worked it back and forth, and 
have seen the picture come? So under the influence of 
Christ, working in a room that seems as if it were a dark 
room, you have seen the virtues grow into sight that men 
before could not see, and patience and meekness and self- 



THE SECRET AND THE REVEALED THINGS. 23 

sacrifice have grown to be the world's glory. And as you 
can see that our Christ is to us the type of man for men 
and women to follow after, so you can see that He is the 
manifestation of God. Now, the moment 1 say this, your 
minds are apt to run right back to this question : What is 
His relation to the Eternal Father? For myself, I say 
frankly, I do not know. What I do know is this : That 
there is no other life and no other manifestation in history, 
in humanity, in nature, in philosophy, in art, nothing else 
that so reveals to me the Eternal Goodness as does the life 
of Jesus of Nazareth. That is enough for me to know, and 
that I do know. Do you remember how Paul, going into 
Athens, looked upon all their idols and altars and temples, 
and he said, I have been looking upon the objects of your 
reverence. One after another of the world's objects of rev- 
erence have been fading out of sight, until now there has 
come to be but one object of reverence — Jesus Christ. Our 
thought of God is no longer a Phoenician God of might. 
No ! no ! we will not worship power. Our conception of 
God is no longer a Brahmanic conception of God, al- 
though some Brahmins come over here to try to give it us. 
We no longer worship pure intellect. That is not the ob- 
ject of our reverence. The object of our reverence is no 
longer the Mohammedan conception of God — law incar- 
nate. The Calvinist conception of God has faded out of 
human life. Our object of reverence is love ; and love as 
it shows itself in the supreme form of love — self-sacrifice ; 
and self-sacrifice as it shows itself in the supreme form of 
self-sacrifice — laying down life for others ; and that supreme 
form — laying down life for those who do not deserve it, do 
not appreciate it. There is nothing beyond that. So to 
live as to be willing to die, and so to live as to be willing 
to die for men who do not deserve love and do not appre- 
ciate love — that is supreme — there is nothing beyond that. 



24 THE SECRET AND THE REVEALED THINGS. 

That is luminous in the Cross of Christ who is the one 
sovereign, supreme, supernatural object of the world's rever- 
ence. If I had time I could turn to Renan, the French 
infidel, to Hooykaas, the Dutch infidel, to John Stuart Mill, 
the English infidel, and read you from their pages words of 
reverence more appreciative of Jesus Christ than you could 
find in the monkish scholasticism of the Middle Ages, pious 
as it was. 

I have a friend in the country who has in one of his 
rooms a plate-glass window, framed with a picture frame ; 
and as you go into the room it appears as though there 
w^as a beautiful landscape hanging on the wall before you — 
mountain, tree, river, lawn, all brought within the compass of 
that frame. One man going in says. What a beautiful pic- 
ture that is ! And another man says. It is not a picture 
at all, it is plate glass you are looking through. And the 
first says. No ; it is a human production, but it looks exactly 
like mountain, and river, and lawn. The other says. It is 
mountain, river, lawn, you see through the glass. That is 
the difference between the Unitarian and the Orthodox. 
Both stand and look. One says, It is a man, but all the 
qualities in him are Divine. The other says. You are mis- 
taken ; when you come to understand it better you will see 
that it is a plate- glass window and through it you are see- 
ing God Himself, not merely a picture of God. I am or- 
thodox ; I believe that I see through the plate-glass window 
the very face of God Himself. But, after all, the one vital 
thing, the one essential thing, the one transcendent thing, is 
this : that Jesus Christ has brought us a new conception of 
God into the World ; He has made us see that God is not 
mere force — as the Phoenicians thought ; not mere intel- 
lect — as the Brahmins thought; not incarnate law — as the 
Mohammedans thought ; but that God is love. We can 
understand that w^hich Christ teaches us : we can under- 



THE SECRET AND THE REVEALED THINGS. 2$ 

stand His relation to us ; and that other side that reaches 
back to the Eternal Father I am glad to leave a solemn, 
awful, splendid mystery. 

There has been a great deal of discussion on the ques- 
tion. What was the effect of the sacrifice and death of 
Christ in working out the forgiveness of sins? What is the 
proper theory, it is said, of the atonement? At one time 
it was said that the world had sold itself to the devil. We 
belonged to him, and God bought us back from the devil 
by giving His own Son to the devil instead. And the devil 
thought he had made a good bargain ; but he could not 
keep the Son in his possession ; for the Son was too strong 
for him. So he lost both the purchase price and the capi- 
tal he had before. You smile, but it was serious theology 
at one time. And then there was the theory that God was 
angry, and that Jesus Christ came into the world to placate 
the anger of God. And then there was the theory that the 
angels and the saints looked on the drama that was being 
wrought on this world, and it was necessary for the moral 
effect upon the whole universe that sin should not be for- 
given without a penalty being inflicted for it. Law required 
it. All of these theories, you see, were alike in this : They 
all considered what is the effect of the passion and death 
of Christ on supernal beings, on the devil, on God, on the 
saints and angels unknown to us. Discussion of that is 
well — at least may be well for those who have time and in- 
clination for it. It quickens the intellect, and there is this 
to be said for it : It is better to spend one^s time on such 
questions than to spend it all on stocks and bonds and 
houses and afternoon teas. To be considering what are the 
eternal things that lie beyond the limits of our vision, even 
though to consider it to little purpose, is better than to 
spend it all on mere temporal and sensuous matters. But 
what we do know is the effect which the passion, the life, 



20 THE SECRET AND THE REVEALED THINGS. 

the incarnation and the death of Jesus Christ has wrought 
on human history. Where it touches us, that we can under- 
stand. Where it touches the devil, we cannot; where it 
touches God Ahnighty in His eternal justice, we cannot 
know ; where it touches the great universe, we cannot know. 
But where it touches human life and human experience, 
there we can know. Go to any heathen temple, and what 
will you find? The note, from beginning to end, a note of 
complaint, a cry. Go into a Christian temple, and what 
will you find? Just such hymns as we have been singing 
here this morning — praise, thanksgiving, gladness. You 
may search all Pagan Hterature from A to Z and you will 
not find, all put together, as much note of hope, as much 
sense of peace, as much joy in pardon, as much confidence 
in God's forgiveness, as much sweetness and song, as you 
will find in any one of such hymns in the modern Christian 
hymn-book. The world has gotten a new experience be- 
cause of Christ's death. We have a new sense of duty to 
our neighbor ; we have learned to forgive one another ; we 
have a new conception of social obligation. We are no 
longer studying merely how to avenge crime, but how to 
cure it. We are learning to see sin as Christ saw it, as an 
awful disease, and to feel respecting sin as Christ felt — a 
profound pity. Our prisons are penitentiaries — in theory 
at least, places for the development of penitence ; and the 
best overseers and the best wardens are trying to work out 
a system of criminal dealing along the line of redemption 
and purification. You can know what Christ's death may 
be to you. If you have come in here with a burden, He 
can take it off. If you have come in here careless. He can 
teach you to know your need. If you are a sinner and know 
your need of forgiveness, He can bring you forgiveness and 
send you away rejoicing. If you have come in here with a 
hard heart. He can take the hardness and bitterness out, 



THE SECRET AND THE REVEALED THINGS. 2/ 

and He can make you see that it is a splendid thing to 
suffer for one who does not deserve the suffering. 

What God is in His essence, we cannot know. It seems 
strange that the finite should imagine that He can define 
the infinite. But we can know that we are livmg under a 
law of physical order and of physical and moral progress, 
and take new hope from our sense of loyalty to the un- 
known God. What is His method of manifesting Himself 
to others, we cannot know ; but we can open our hearts to 
His sunshine, and receive His life. What the Christ is in 
His relations to the Eternal Father, we cannot know; but 
to us He can be the model which we follow and the revela- 
tion of God whom we adore. What has been the effect of 
the Cross of Christ on the supernatural and invisible world, 
we can at best only surmise ; but we can let that cross 
preach peace to our own hearts and forgiveness to our own 
souls and inspire in us the spirit of a Christly pity, because 
that is a Divine pity. The secret things belong to God. 
Let us stand with awe and reverence before the curtain. 
The revealed things belong to us, and they belong to us 
that we may know and do the will of God. 



THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

^'' I have fought a good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept 

the faith:'' ^^ 

^}\ (Timothy, tv,*^.) 

These words are supposed to have been written as Paul 
was approaching the end of his Hfe. He speaks of himself 
as a sacrifice, ready to be offered in its completion to Al- 
mighty God. '' I am already being offered, and the time 
of my departure is at hand." And then he looks back, and 
this is what his memory is able to bring to him : '' I have 
fought a good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept 
the faith.'' 

It is certain he could not have uttered these words un- 
less life had been a battle to him : It was not an easy 
thing for him to maintain a Christian experience and a 
Christian life ; unless it had been a race : He never was 
satisfied, but was always pushing on to something higher 
and better ; unless there had been something given to him 
to guard which he had found it difficult to guard : " I have 
kept the faith." It is to these three aspects of life I 
desire to call your thought this morning. 

First. Life is a battle. It is a commonplace of science 
now to say that struggle for existence, ^^ survival of the 
fittest," is the aphorism and the interpretation of life. And 
though that has been enlarged, rightly and wisely, by 
Drummond, to struggle for others as well as struggle for 

28 



THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 29 

existence, still it is a struggle. Looked at in the very lowest 
plane, and in the very simplest form, life is a battle. If we 
rise from the material form to the social and commercial, 
you all recognize that. Life is a constant struggle. Com- 
merce is a form of warfare, and only the men who have 
some war power in them win in the battle. It is true the 
battle is oftentimes an evil one ; oftentimes corrupted by 
greed of booty ; but it is a battle. It is in vain for us to 
devise schemes by which competition can be put out of 
civilized life. Competition is the condition of life. It is 
the scientific condition of physical life. It is the scientific 
condition of social life. The men who drop out of compe- 
tition drop out of life. The men who either are so satisfied 
that they no longer care to struggle, or are so discouraged 
that they no longer have any hope for struggle, these are, 
on the one hand, the idle rich, and, on the other hand, the 
idle poor. The men who are doing anything in life are en- 
gaged in a struggle. 

It has been the law of all political progress. We have 
had to battle since the world began. Eternal vigilance is 
the price, not only of liberty, but of all forms of righteous- 
ness. In the midst of battle we look back and long for the 
times that are past, when there was purity and honesty, 
and truth and righteousness, without a battle. There 
never was such a time. There was the same corruption to 
be fought in the days of Washington, and the same corrup- 
tion to be fought in the days of Lincoln, that there is to be 
fought now. There was the same civic strife in New York, 
fifty or a hundred years ago, that there is to-day in New York. 
The battle is not a new one. Therefore history, civic and 
social purity and truth and righteousness have been main- 
tained only by men with their guns in their hands. It 
has been the law of all theological progress. Then look 
back along the history of the church and scoff at the old 



30 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

theological conflicts. They ridicule the controversies 
which have agitated the church and call them battles about 
words. But they were not battles about words. It is 
true that the flames of hell sometimes mingled with the 
flames of Heaven, true that the devil had his share in the 
battles in the church, as he has his share in other battles. 
But there never would have been growth in religious 
knowledge if there had not been controversy. The truth 
has been struck out by controversy, as the spark is 
struck out by the flint and the steel. It has been in the 
friction of man with man that the truth has ever been 
evoked, and, so far as we can see, will be evoked to the end 
of time. It has not stolen noiselessly upon men ; it has 
come out of the glare of the cannon and out of the smoke 
of the battle. 

What is true in the material and the social, and the polit- 
ical and the theological world, is true in the moral world. 
There is no winning of character without battle. No man 
attains manhood easily. Every man has a battle to fight. 
I suppose there is no profession, some representative of 
which has not come to me at some time, in person or by 
letter, and asked. Is it possible for a man to succeed in this 
profession and be a Christian ? I have had merchants say, 
*^ Can a man be a successful merchant and be a Christian? '' 
I have had lawyers say, '^ Can a man be a successful lawyer 
and be a Christian? '* I have had poHticians say, " Can a 
man be a successful politician and be a Christian?" I 
have had doctors say, ^^Can a man practise medicine and 
be a consistent Christian?'* And I have had ladies say, 
" Can one go into society and be a consistent Christian? " I 
never did have a minister ask me, *^ Can a man be a 
minister and be a consistent Christian? " but he might ask 
it just as well. There is absolutely no walk in life in which 
there are not temptations. It is not easy, in the competi- 



THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 3 1 

tion of life, in the dealing with unscrupulous competitors, 
to maintain a high, noble standard of integrity in com- 
mercial business. It is done, but it is to be done by battle. 
It is not easy in journalism to stand for the truth, the whole 
truth and nothing but the truth. There are men who are 
doing it, men who are ready to sacrifice bread and butter 
and salary, to go hungry themselves, and even suffer the 
wife and children to go hungry, rather than prostitute their 
pen to lascivious and evil purposes. But no man stands 
for truth in journalism who does not have to fight to do it ; 
no man can go into any profession, I do not care what 
it is, without having a battle to fight with foes that be- 
leaguer him. He cannot stand in my own profession with- 
out it. It is not easy for a minister to be absolutely 
sincere, absolutely candid. I believe there are as many 
brave men, at least, in the pulpit as there are in any other 
profession. I am inclined to think there are more. But 
it is not easy for a man to stand for what he thinks is the 
truth and righteousness in his day and generation and 
speak with only the fear of God, and without the fear of 
men. He cannot do it without a battle. 

But this is nothing as compared with the battle a man 
has to fight within himself. There are, perhaps, eighteen 
hundred people in this house. If there are, they are 
eighteen hundred battle-fields, or nearly that. It is possible 
there way be some saints who have risen so high and gone 
so far that, like Paul, they can say, " I have fought my 
fight," and look back upon it as a thing that is ended. It 
is possible that there are some cowards and cravens and 
camp followers who have fallen out of the ranks, who have 
given up the battle and have surrendered themselves, to be 
bound hand and foot, carried whithersoever what they are 
pleased to call their destiny may carry them. But leaving 
out this handful of saints that are perfected, if such there 



32 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

are, and this handful of the sinners that are hopeless, if 
such there are, every soul in this house is a battle-field, and 
every man knows he is a battle-field and thinks his neighbor 
is not. One man has to fight natural acquisitiveness in 
order to be benevolent ; another man has to fight natural 
pride in order to be humble ; another man has to fight 
natural irritabihty in order to be patient ; another man has 
to fight natural vanity in order to be truly sympathetic, 
without being swayed and turned aside by every wind of 
doctrine and every passing opinion. Every man is a battle- 
field j and it is only by the battle the man is made — only 
thus. Life would not be worth living if there were no 
battles. For we could not be heroes if there were no strife. 
There is no way of getting courage except by having to 
face danger; no way of getting humility, except by making 
pride bow its head; no way of getting the power of a 
strong, resolute purpose, except by making approbativeness 
the servant of conscience ; no way of becoming truly loving, 
except by making selfishness bow its head to the yoke of 
righteousness. We win our victories by our battles and 
gain our characters by our conquests. This is the first 
battle for us to fight. Not the battle for purity in the city, 
or purity in the nation, or purity in the State. First, the 
battle for purity in our own hearts and our owti lives. 

I read last night in Tennyson's life Tennyson's poem, 
" Britons, Guard Your Own." Let me read one verse. 

Call home your ships across Biscayan tides, 
To blow the battle from their oaken sides. 

Why waste they yonder 

Their idle thunder? 
Why stay they there to guard a foreign throne? 
Seamen, guard your own ! 

It would be a good verse to ring out now in politics. 



THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 33 

While men are asking us to make navies that shall do 
battle for Cuba, and for Hawaii, it will be well for us to 
begin to cry out " Americans, guard your own I " It is not 
in Cuba, not in Hawaii, not along the Canadian boundary, 
not with Spain or England or any foreign foe, the chief 
battle is to be fought. They are our chief enemies who 
creep with slimy mark and poisonous purpose into the 
heart of the nation ; who put their hand upon the throat of 
a great city, while they rifle its pocket with the other ; they 
are our enemies who enter our home and work evil, 
in luxury, licentiousness and divorce ; they are our ene- 
mies who enter our commerce with adulterated goods and 
poisonous drugs ; they are our enemies who enter our hearts 
and put there their pride and selfishness and all damnable 
vice. Americans, guard your own ! And you, young men, 
do not think that you can fight corruption without while 
you let corruption fester within. You cannot fight a cor- 
rupt government and be wilHng yourself to cheat the gov- 
ernment of its taxes. You cannot fight indifference in 
other men and be yourself careless of your own public 
duties. You cannot fight the greed that riots and plunders 
and have your own fingers itch with greed to plunder men. 
^^ Americans, guard your own ! " Life is a battle, a battle 
in one's own heart, and there first the victory must be won. 

Life is a race. " I have finished the course.'' And in 
some sense the race follows the battle. We fight the battle 
that we may get liberty to run the race. Lay aside every 
weight and the sin that doth so easily beset you, and run 
with patience the race that is set before you. The first 
thing to do is to get rid of the encumbering weight, to lay 
aside the besetting sin ; the next thing is to run the race 
without hindrance. 

I wish I could put before you Symonds' graphic picture 
of the Olympian Games. The time has come — the Spring 
3 



34 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

time — for the races. From all over Greece men are gath- 
ering to this great occasion. Merchants and pedlers are 
coming with their wares ; princes with their retinues ; 
women in their pomp and circumstance. Poets are coming 
with their poems ; historians to read their histories, and 
dramatists to read their dramas (for there are no printed 
books) ; and politicians to ply their trade as well. All 
Greece is gathering at the 01)Tiipian Games. The hour 
has come. Men are ranged alongside one another. The 
signal is given ; they start and run their eager race ; and 
when it is over, the crown is given to one. And the great- 
est poet of Greece counts himself not unworthy to sing 
the praise of a man who wins the race in the Olympian 
Games — something such as this is the picture which is before 
Paul, when he says, ^^ I have finished the course." He has 
been running a race. He tells us in Philippians what this 
race is. " Forgetting those things which are behind, reach- 
ing forward to those things which are before, I press to- 
ward the mark for the upward calling of God in Christ 
Jesus.'' 

Life is a constant pursuit of an ever-vanishing ideaL 
This man is working for money. He thinks he will be 
rich when he gets ten thousand. When he gets ten thou- 
sand, he thinks he will be rich when he gets a hundred 
thousand. When he gets a hundred thousand, he thinks 
he will be rich when he gets a million. When he gets a 
million, he thinks he will be rich when he gets a hundred 
million. And when he gets a hundred million, he still 
wants more. His idea of wealth is always an evanescent 
ideal. 

We are constantly improving our comforts, constantly 
enlarging our material resources, and we never go fast 
enough. We thought it was a great achievement when 
we could travel in the cars twenty miles an hour, then 



THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 35 

forty, and now we are talking about a hundred. We 
thought we had made great progress when we got rid of 
the 'busses of Broadway and got horse-cars. Now we have 
cable cars that carry us twice as fast as horse-cars, and still 
we want ^' rapid transit.'^ The luxuries of yesterday are the 
comforts of to-day and the necessities for to-morrow. The 
ideal of civilization is always a vanishing ideal. So in 
government. The whole political history of the world has 
been climbing up the hill toward an ideal. Government 
to-day, with all its corruption, is better than it ever was 
before ; but our ideal of government has grown a great 
deal faster than the government has grown. It ought to 
be so. It should grow faster. So in scholarship. The 
boy thinks it is an easy thing to be a scholar. When he 
gets to a certain age in boyhood or girlhood, he thinks 
he knows almost everything. But as he goes on with his 
studies the area to be studied grows faster than the area 
which is covered by his study ; and when he gets to the end 
of his life, and all men are looking up to him as a learned 
man, he says, I do not know anything. So in our produc- 
tive work. The poet is never satisfied with his poem. 
The artist is never satisfied with his picture. The orator 
is never satisfied with his speech. When men come to 
him, and say, That was a splendid speech you delivered, 
he hangs his head in shame, for he knows that he has 
failed. He knows the thoughts that burned within him in 
his heart, the picture he saw in his closet, he has failed 
to interpret. He could not do it. The ideal lay far be- 
yond his achievement. 

So the ideal of character always runs beyond the attain- 
ment. I meet now and then in the little pastoral work I 
am permitted to do, with men and women — more women 
— who have grown discouraged, because they are not able 
to come up to their ideal. My friend, if you were able to 



35 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

come up to your ideal, then you ought to be discouraged. 
There are two classes of persons that drop out of life. 
First, those that are discouraged. You cannot put courage 
in their hearts. Secondly, those that are self-satisfied. It is 
almost impossible to do anything for them. " Seest thou a 
man wise in his own conceit, there is more hope of a fool 
than of him." Life is a perpetual pursuit after a higher 
ideal and a vanishing ideal. And yet, do we not look back- 
ward for our ideal? Is it not the character of Christ that 
is always ideal ? Yes ; and it is a w^onderful witness to the 
transcendent character of Christ that it grows more and 
more ideal the more we approach it, and, as it were, van- 
ishes beyond our sight the nearer we come to it. 

Our race is — forgetting those things and reaching for- 
ward to those things that are before — to press toward the 
mark of upward call of God in Christ Jesus — a call that 
ever says higher and still higher. Nor shall the Christian 
soul be satisfied until it has a character so pure and true 
that it rings responsive to every verse in the fifth chapter 
of Matthew; knows no lustful thought, knows no un- 
charitable thought, knows no profane thought, knows no 
hateful thought, loves all men, loves enemies. Nor shall 
the Christian ideal be satisfied in our lives until our service 
is sacrifice and our sacrifice is joy. Nor shall the Christian 
ideal be attained by us until our submission is more than 
resignation and our prayer is not what we will, but what 
Thou wilt. Nor shall our Christian ideal be reached until 
our life of devotion is no longer asking the Father for 
things, but living in the Father as Christ lived in Him, 
sharing the glory of the Father as Christ shared that 
glory ; not wTestling in prayer, but coming to Him always 
with the word, ^^ I know that thou hearest me always.*' 

Life is a treasure guarding. '^ I have kept the faith." 
You have read the story, perhaps, of friends going on a 



THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 37 

journey across the plain. There is treasure in the stage 
coach. A band of robbers surround and attack it. Some 
seize the leaders by the head ; some turn their weapons 
against the coach, and cry, Hold up your hands ! But they 
are not cowards on this stage coach. They do not hold up 
their hands, except to hold them with pistols in them, and 
answer shot with shot, and those holding the leaders by 
the head drop down from that fire and sneak away. And 
the stage drives on, and the treasure has been saved. And 
still there is a long journey across the arid plain, and the 
wounded are to be carried and cared for as best they can 
during this long journey, and it is wearisome and perilous. 
But at last that, too, is ended. And when at last the stage 
coach drives in to its destination, and they that were 
carrying the treasure get down from the box, this is what 
they can say : We have fought a good fight, we fought it 
bravely ; we have finished our journey, we came through 
it patiently \ we have kept the treasure that was given to 
us, here it is. This is life as Paul described it. First, a 
hard fight, then a wearisome journey, but at the end of it 
this: "I have kept the faith." 

You remember how he tells the Philippians what he had 
kept before he became a Christian. As touching right- 
eousness, that is, in the law, he says, I was blameless. He 
kept the righteousness. But when he came to the end of 
his Christian life, what he says is, '< I have kept the faith." 
It is both more and less to keep the faith than to keep the 
righteousness. What he has kept is his faith in truth, his 
faith in the Eternal, his faith in himself as God's child. If 
he interprets the race in the Epistle to the Philippians, and 
if he interprets the battle by a passage in Corinthians, 
which I will not stop to read, he interprets what it is to 
keep the faith by the last two verses of the eighth chapter 
of Romans. " I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, 



38 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things pres- 
ent, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any 
other creation, shall be able to separate us from the love of 
God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." They tried to 
separate him. They try to separate us. They had failed. 
Shall they succeed with us ? 

Things present. There are a great many of them to- 
day. We are surrounded with beautiful things, luxurious 
things, enticing and attractive things. It is not so easy 
to keep spiritual life in a world so full of rich civilization 
as it is in a world of comparative povert)\ It w^as a great 
deal easier for a Puritan to keep his spiritual faith in 
England in 162 1 than it is for the son of a Puritan to keep 
it in this year of grace (1898) in New York and Brooklyn. 
Because it is easier to keep faith when faith is your only 
refuge, and all around you is howling wilderness and pri- 
vation, than it is to keep faith with luxury and ease and 
comfort enticing you and environing you. 

It is not only things present that overcome our faith, but 
it is the future also ; future fears, future hopes, future am- 
bitions, future expectations. And it is life ; life with all its 
activities. Who is there in this congregation who has not 
sometimes almost w^ished for the old monastic peace — 
who has not sometimes desired to go into a retreat? 
Who has not said to himself, if I could only shut off the 
activities of life and shut myself up in a closet and give 
myself to prayer and Bible reading? But to be a saint in 
Wall Street, in the court-room, in politics, in society, in 
the afternoon reception, to be a saint here in New York, 
just as New York is to-day, that is difficult. It is a difficult 
struggle when all life tugs at our shoulders, to be true to 
Christ and ourselves ; in the midst of life to keep our 
faith. All our life is battling. x\nd there are some — 
they are not here to-day, but they belong to us — whom 



THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 39 

weakness is undermining and sickness is laying siege to, 
who are steadily drifting down towards the doors of death, 
to whom life seems never so sweet as it seems now, as they 
are beginning to take their departure, and who look at 
those great gates, which may be pearly on the other side, 
but are dark granite on this, and wonder whether they 
have fought the good fight, and whether they can keep the 
faith. 

All this experience Paul in lesser measure knew. He 
lived also in a luxurious age and knew what it was to have 
difficulties in his life to rob him of his faith. He lived 
midst perils and hopes, and knew what it was to have 
future fears to imperil his faith. He lived in a time of tre- 
mendous activity (no hider in masked solitude was he, but 
in the midst of life), and knew what it was to have life 
keep him so busy that he hardly had time to think of faith, 
and kaew what it was, once and again, and yet again, to 
face death and wonder into what the portals would lead 
him. He kept the faith : the clear vision of the Eternal, 
the transcendent appreciation of the Eternal, the enthu- 
siasm for the Eternal, the love for the Eternal, the Divine, 
the Everlasting Father, the Christ of God. And keeping 
it, he looked up for the coronation — not a reward for 
righteousness, but a crown of righteousness, when he should 
awake and be satisfied because he should awake in the 
likeness of Christ and see Him as he was. And do you 
know, my friends, to whom this coronation is promised? 
To men that have won the victory? No. Only to men 
who have fought the fight. The reward alike to the men 
who fought at Bull Run and the men who fought at Ap- 
pomattox Court House. Only denied to the cowards and 
the cravens that ran away. Though you lie wounded, 
though you have been beaten down again and again, 
though you are in hospital, bedridden, where it seems as 



40 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

though you could do no more fighting, if still you have at 
heart the purpose to fight the battle to the end, coronation 
shall be yours. To those who have won the race ? No, 
not to those who have won the race — to those who have 
finished the course. If you have fallen out by the way, 
grown discouraged, and abandoned it, or grown self-con- 
ceited, and said, I am wholly sanctified, I do not need to 
try any more, there is no promise for you ; but for the 
man who finishes the course, who keeps on, though he be 
lame and paralyzed and broken down, still holding on, 
though he be the last in all that run the Olympian game, 
he shall have the coronation. To those who have kept 
righteousness, to those who are pure and holy and sinless ? 
No. To those who have kept the faith, to those who still 
believe in righteousness, to those who still hold fast to it, to 
those who still love it, and would give themselves to it, to 
those who have both kept faith with God and faith with 
themselves, and to those who love his appearing and long 
for the time when the kingdom of righteousness shall come 
in and His will shall be done, cost what it may to us, and 
His kingdom come, not ours, and His glory be revealed, 
not ours. God help us so to live, that when we do look 
back, as in that last day we all shall, we can look back with 
a memory that says, I have at least fought a good fight, I 
have at least kept up the course to the end, and whatever 
else I have lost, I have held at least to my faith in God 
and in righteousness. 



THE HOPE THAT IS IN HE. 

« « * * ^^ ready always to give an answer to every man that 
askethyou a reason of the hope that is inyou^ with meekness and fear, 

(/. Peter, Hi. 15.) 

I AM going to try this morning to comply with that direc- 
tion — to speak to you, in some sense peculiarly, out of my 
own experience ; and if the autobiographical nature of this 
morning's discourse gives it a certain egotistical tinge, I 
trust to your charity to pardon that fact. I do not think 
by nature I am an over-sanguine man ; but I am full of 
hope. And if I tried in some measure to define that hope 
to myself and to you, talking to you gathered here much as 
I might talk to an individual who came to me in my study, 
saying : Give me a reason for your hopefulness, I should 
say, first of all, that my hope is in a good God ; in a Being 
who is, in some sense, at the center of the universe, order- 
ing, directing and controlling it ; in a good God, whom 
the longer I live the less I understand and the better I 
know ; a good God, who will bring order out of chaos, and 
moral order out of moral chaos, who will bring, at the last, 
victory to the right. And because I have this hope in a 
good God at the center of the universe who orders and 
controls it, and who means to accomplish righteousness and 
will at the last accomplish righteousness, I am not dis- 
couraged by defeats. I can as little doubt the tendency of 
human life because of occasional lapses and defeats as I 

41 



42 THE HOPE THAT IS IN ME. 

can doubt the course of a river because of the eddies along 
its bank, or as I can doubt the ultimate issue of spring by a 
snow flurry in May. My hope for the progiess of the 
human race, or the progress of liberty, of education, of 
virtue — in one word, of all that goes to make up character, 
does not rest primarily in the progress achieved in the 
past ; it does not rest primarily in my faith in men as 
men ; it rests primarily in my faith that there is a good 
God at the center of the universe who orders and directs 
life, who out of chaos will bring order, out of moral chaos 
will bring moral order, out of war will bring peace, out of 
confusion will bring accord — yea, out of sin will bring the 
victory of righteousness. 

This hope of mine is not founded on reason. I am going 
to give reasons for it this morning, but I have not argued it 
out and created it by the process of logical construction ; 
it lies deeper than that ; it is wrought into my very nature ; 
it has grown out of my experience ; it is a part of my very 
consciousness. If you were to ask me how do I know that 
there is a good God, I think I should have to answer you 
by asking you how do you know that there is a good man ; 
how do you know that there is a good wife, or a good 
mother, or a good friend. If, indeed, some one were to 
come to you and say, half in honest skepticism and half in 
taunting, why is your wife more to you than any other 
woman ? Why do you love her ? Your first answer would 
not be the service she has rendered. You have not been 
keeping through these years a debit and credit account, 
charging her with the mishaps and crediting her with the 
excellences and striking a balance in her favor. That is 
not the reason you love her. If some one should come and 
ask yon for a reason for your love you would have to stop 
and think, and you would remember how she watched you 
in time of sickness ; how patient she had been to you in 



THE HOPE THAT IS IN ME. 43 

times of your impatience ; how she stood at your side in 
the time when the burden came and helped you to bear it ; 
how she inflamed your heart with courage when you were 
half inclined to retreat; how you have been enabled to 
hold to higher standards of purity and honor than you 
would have held had you not that wife at your side, and 
so you would be able to give an account. But you do not 
base your love on any such conscious account. That love 
is wrought into your experience. You love her, though 
you may know not why, until some one asks you why. So, 
in my conscious experience, I trust and love the good God. 
But I have to stop and think and calculate if I am going 
to give an answer to one who asks me for the reason of my 
hope. And yet I do not think my hope is unreasonable — 
that is, unable to give a reason. We Christians believe in 
Christ and in God, not because we have reason. But 
having our faith, and being asked why we have it, and 
having our hope, and being asked why we possess it, we 
ought to be able to answer that question to ourselves and 
to any who may ask us. 

There will be, indeed, some in this congregation this 
morning— wives and mothers some— who will think that I 
am raising more doubts than I am answering. Perhaps you 
are right. And yet, mother, who know you hope and 
never have asked yourself why you hope, your child is 
asking it. They cannot go to school or college, they can- 
not enter into the strife of business, they cannot come 
into the temptation of life without being impinged upon by 
those who have no hope and who doubt the reasonableness 
of their hope, and are not moved by the simple answer of 
the mother who says I have hope. You need to be able 
to give an answer to the boy or the girl who asks you a 
reason for the hope that is in you. It is not enough to 
have the hope yourself. And yet I say again, the ho]^c is 



44 THE HOPE THAT IS IN ME. 

not founded on reason. We have not built it up by the 
process through which I am going this morning. There 
will be some of you who will go away from this morning's 
service shaking your heads and saying, I cannot build up 
my hope by any such process as the preacher has gone 
through to-day. And you will be right ; you cannot. I 
am not trying to build a hope, I am trying to show that the 
Christian's hope is not contrary to reason. You see the 
difference, do you not ? 

In one way, the process I am going through is one I 
have often gone through with myself, and still have to, 
sometimes. When I was a boy at college I doubted every- 
thing — no, not quite — I think I never doubted that there 
was a God, and I think I never doubted my own immortal- 
ity, but everything else was either swept away or involved 
in fog, and for a little time I steered my life as yesterday 
the steamers steered their way in New York harbor, not by 
any light, but by bells and signals I heard from other lives. 
It is a good way to steer if you have not light yourself. 

I have hope, then, that there is a good God at the heart 
of the universe^ and that he is working out good, not evil, 
and the end of His work will be victory for righteousness 
and peace. I ask myself, Is this a reasonable hope ? And 
I look out into nature and life to see if it be reasonable. 
And what first we see, when so we look out into nature 
and life to see if this hope be reasonable, is that there is 
an intellectual order in the universe. That is certain. If 
there were no intellectual order in the universe we could 
not think about it ; we could not trace its processes nor its 
laws. Science is not a mere gathering of phenomena and 
throwing them into one great heap together ill-assorted. 
Science is not a mere assorting of phenomena in different 
pigeon-holes and with different labels. Science is the 
discovery of the intellectual relations which already exist 



THE HOPE THAT IS IN ME. 45 

in phenomena, and if there are no intellectual relations 
there can be no perception of intellectual relations. There 
is an intellectual order in the universe. That is certain. 
In other words, we are not in the presence of a great va- 
riety of phenomena, we are in a universe — a variety that 
is unified ; a variety that circles around some one great 
center. Conceive a blind man studying astronomy, through 
the instructions of a professor who should tell this blind 
man how the planets, among them our earth, move around 
a common center, held to that center by one central orb, 
and the blind man looking up into the heavens and seeing 
nothing, could only feel a warmth, you would get an illus- 
tration of the scientific argument for the existence of 
God. All things move around a common center, and there 
is some one, or somewhat, if you will, in that center, and 
though your eyes are blind and you look up and you see 
nothing, you feel a warmth at least, and you know, or may 
if you will, that there is a central Orderer, or there could 
not be any universe, only a great collection of unrelated 
phenomena. 

And as there is an intellectual order in the material 
universe, so there is a moral order in the world of men, 
impinged upon by disorder, broken in upon by frag- 
mentary and disobedient wills — but a moral order. It is 
not more certain that there are laws of harmony which 
discord violates ; that there are laws of taste which ugli- 
ness violates ; that there are laws of wisdom which folly 
violates — these are not more certain than that there are laws 
of righteousness which sin violates. We do not create 
these laws of right and wrong any more than we create 
these laws of harmony, these laws of beauty. The organ- 
ist does not produce harmony, save as he plays in accord 
with laws of harmony that are infinite, eternal, inaudible. 
The artist does not achieve beauty, save as he understands 



46 THE HOPE THAT IS IN ME. 

the invisible and uninterpreted laws of beauty and learns 
how to express them. And it is not more certain that 
there are these laws of beauty and of harmony than that 
there are laws of righteousness. Our whole society is based 
on this — our government, our family, our social life, our 
industrial life, everything. Deny the existence of moral 
laws and there is chaos in humanity ; no longer a history ; 
no longer a sociology ; no longer a moral philosophy ; no 
longer an organism ; no longer anything- — chaos. And 
so I know that there is a moral order in the universe, as 
I know that there is an intellectual order in the universe 
of matter. It is. I do not create it by my imagination ; 
it is not the product of my brain. I find it. It is dis- 
covered, not invented. 

More than that, science and philosophy are making it 
clear that the moral order of the universe and the intel- 
lectual or material order of the universe is an ordered 
progress. This is what evolution means — ordered 
progress ; development from poorer to richer, from lower 
to higher, from less to greater — progress. In the mate- 
rial universe, progress to higher forms ; in the moral uni- 
verse, progress to higher life. We are living in a ma- 
terial universe under an intellectual order, in a moral uni- 
verse under a moral order, and in a material and moral 
universe whose law of order is a law of constant progress. 
Growth — that is the last word which science has to utter, 
the last word which philosophy has had to utter. It is 
true there is much that seems inconsistent with growth, 
and many obstacles and recessions and lapses. It is true 
that growth fights its way against obstacles, but it is also 
true that the fight is the means of the growth ; that the 
struggle for existence is the condition of the survival of 
the fittest, and the struggle for others is the condition of 
the survival of the best — those most worth surviving. An 



THE HOPE THAT IS IN ME. 47 

intellectual order — a moral order — an ordered progress ; 
this is the verdict of science and philosophy concerning 
life. 

And then, still in my questioning whether my hope in a 
good God at the center of the universe is a reasonable 
hope, a hope able to give a reason for itself, I turn and 
look within. And if I am sure of anything respecting 
myself, I am sure of my own personality. I am sure that 
I am. I am sure that I am something more than a ma- 
chine. I am sure that at the center and heart of my being 
is a will that can control, and a conscience that can ex- 
ercise judgment, and an intellect that can understand. 
And I am sure that there are influences about me which 
help and strengthen me when I desire to walk in the 
path of progress and of righteousness. I am sure that 
there are other influences than those I see, and the pulsa- 
tion of which I can feel, and the nature of which I can 
interpret. I am sure, in other words (to use Matthew 
Arnold's phrase), " That there is a Power not myself that 
makes for righteousness." 

Is this, perhaps, my fancy, the tancy of my imagination? 
Has it been something that has been educated in me by 
a pious mother and a devout and godly father? It is the 
most universal phenomenon in human consciousness. 
There are many men and many women who have no 
sense of beauty; many who have no sense of musical 
sound ; many who have no good judgment to discrimi- 
nate between the wise and the foolish ; but it is hard to 
find a man or a woman who has not a sense* of rightness 
and wrongness, and a sense of power on behalf of right- 
ness which they can prove and test if they choose to lay 
hold upon it. And this consciousness of righteousness and 
this consciousness of a somewhat or a some one that is a 
power on behalf of righteousness, is the most universal con- 



48 THE HOPE THAT IS IN ME. 

sciousness, on the whole, in human history. It is true that 
this sense of a power bringing help and strength comes 
through many phases and in many interpretations. All the 
more evidence of the reahty. If there were but one voice, 
if it spake with but one utterance and in one dialect, if it 
showed itseK in one form of experience only, we might 
well think it was one single human quality, handed down 
from father to son through successive generations. But the 
very variety of the dialect is witness of something outside 
of man that speaks. It is a Jehovah that speaks in thun- 
derings and lightnings to Moses. It is a Glorious Presence 
that speaks out of the cherubim to Ezekiel. It is an ap- 
parition that speaks out of the clouds to Paul. It is a 
voice that speaks unheard in the heart of Jesus Christ. It 
is a voice that speaks seemingly in audible utterance to the 
ears of Luther. It is a voice that summons Buddha from 
his luxurious palace to the life of self-sacrifice. It is a 
demon of Socrates inspiring him to nobler and diviner ut- 
terance, and carrying him through the portals, which still 
to him are dark, to a great unknown that lies beyond. In 
all these, and innumerable forms, it speaks. Who of you 
in this great audience have not sometimes heard this voice? 
In your childhood, in your manhood. Perhaps speaking 
even with clearer and louder voice — certainly so if you 
have followed where it leads; perhaps showing itself in 
brighter and brighter apparition — certainly so if you have 
been obedient to the Heavenly vision ; perhaps growing 
dimmer and dimmer as life goes on ; perhaps speaking in 
lower and lower tones, not because the voice grows feebler, 
but because the ears are stopped or deafened. 

An intellectual power at the heart of the material uni- 
verse ; a moral power at the heart of the world of men ; a 
voice that speaks to men in their conscience, to their cour- 
age, to their hope, to their life. And still I am as the 



THE HOPE THAT IS IN ME. 49 

Greek who worships at the altar of an unknown God, or as 
the Jew who stands in the outer court and sees the heavy 
veiled curtain concealing the Holy of Holies, or as the 
Egyptian who in his temple sees inscribed over the inner 
court, " Who is he that shall draw aside my veil? *^ I wonder 
is there any better interpretation of this good God in hu- 
man history than I get in the broken voices I hear in my 
own soul, any better interpretation than the broken voices I 
hear in the voices of poets and prophets of all ages and all 
times, any better revelation, any better unveihng or dis- 
closure than in the lives of men who have lived about me, 
with the good and the evil so intermingled that I know not 
how to draw the line or make the sharp distinction. 

And then (not that this is the way I built up my hope, 
I remind you again — I am not trying to tell you how my 
hope came to me, but how I reasoned it out afterwards 
when man after man came to me with the question, ^' What 
is the^ reason for the hope that is in you? " — I turn to this 
Book and I read the story of this Christ life. Did any 
such man live ? I do not ask that question yet. Is there 
any historical evidence that the Four Gospels are true ? I 
do not ask that question yet. I am like one who walks 
through a great picture gallery, looking at portrait after 
portrait, until at last I come to one and stop there, and 
that portrait transcends all other portraits J have seen yet, 
and I stop and study it. Such a portrait as this has never 
before hung on wall ; true or false, historical or not his- 
torical — Jesus. And as I read the story of that life these 
three things stand out pre-eminent in it : 

First. Here was one who had in his consciousness the 
sense of the Divine with transcendent power. He bore the 
same testimony that Socrates did to his demon ; that Moses 
did to his Jehovah ; that Ezekiel did to the splendid cheru- 
bim ; that Paul did to the flaming apparition on the road 
4 



50 THE HOPE THAT IS IN ME. 

to Damascus ; that Luther did to the voice that spoke to 
him : that I do to the voice that speaks to me. 

Second. Under the inspiration of this voice, guided by 
it, directed by it, controlled by it, mastered by it, he 
lived a life of love — absolute, unsullied, quiet love, unhin- 
dered by passion, unchecked by selfishness, unpolluted by 
irritableness or ungodly life ; a life of love in service, of 
love in service wrought in sacrifice, of love in service 
wrought in sacrifice culminating in death. Is there any 
higher conception of goodness than that? I can find none. 
I look in life — I can see nothing better than this : Love, serv- 
ice, sacrifice. I look in nature — I can conceive nothing 
better than this : Love, service, sacrifice. It is the whole 
trinity of noble living. All that is worthy in life is in those 
three words — love — service — sacrifice. 

It was a strange life, and marked by strange phenomena. 
We call them miracles. He turned water into wine. He 
fed five thousand with two loaves and five small fishes. 
He walked upon the water. He healed the sick with 
touch or word. He rose from the dead. What am I to 
think of these ? My faith in Him does not depend on the 
answer to that question. It does not, indeed, seem strange 
to me that so transcendent a being should have possessed 
and manifested transcendent powers — that on the one 
hand. It does not seem strange to me that He should have 
been misunderstood and misinterpreted by His followers, 
and some things attributed to Him which He never did — 
that on the other. Nor am I anxious to draw sharply the 
line and determine what stands on one side this line and 
what on the other. He said to His disciples : ^' Believe me 
that I am in the Father and the Father in me, or else be- 
lieve me for the very work's sake." I accept the first al- 
ternative. I believe that the Father was in Him, and He in 
the Father. I do not believe Him for the very work's sake. 



THE HOPE THAT IS IN ME. 5 1 

I believe in the works because I believe in Him, not in Him 
because I believe in the works. 

And as I look on this life and as I study it — and now for 
forty years at least I have been making it the center of my 
study — the Bible the book I have studied most, the New 
Testament that half of the Bible which I have studied most 
in the Bible, the life of Christ that portion of the New 
Testament which I have studied most in the New Testa- 
ment, with such time, such patience, such interest and such 
enthusiasm as I could command — and the more I have 
studied it the grander His life has seemed to me, the more 
and more transcendent, the more and more wonderful, until 
it seems to me no longer unreasonable — once I thought it 
was, or, at least, wondered whether it was — it seems to me 
no longer unreasonable to believe that this good God, who 
has created the intellectual order in the material universe, 
who has created the moral order of the moral universe, who 
has spoken in fragmentary and broken voices and shown 
Himself in shadowy lights, reflections from a mirror seen 
darkly in human experience, has shown Himself to the world 
of men in this one central, splendid, lowly life. 

I trace subsequent history. I find it recorded in this 
life of Christ that He said, " I will return again ; I will 
be with you ; I will never leave you ; I will be your com- 
panion ; I will be your strength." I find in this Apostolic 
history that His disciples believed that He had arisen, that 
He might come back and be with them and companion 
them and be their strength. If so, there should be some 
sign of it in human history. If this transcendent figure 
has been walking down the ages He must have left some 
footprints ; He must have left some sign of His presence. 
I turn to the pages of secular history to see what I can 
see, and this is what I see : Gradually, wherever He has 
been known and loved and honored, the world growing 



52 THE HOPE THAT IS IN ME. 

better ; the enslaved set free ; schools established ; old 
men and feeble children no longer turned off to die as 
useless, but hospitals built for them ; the crazy no longer 
looked upon as hated of God and to be despised of men, 
but asylums constructed for them ; nay, criminals no longer 
only flogged or put out of life, but penitentiaries and reform 
schools built for them that they may be brought back to a 
better life and a better mind. I see war gradually amel- 
iorated. I see captives taken in war no longer slaves. 
I see nations even compelled to find some excuse for war 
other than the mere desire for plunder, which was all the 
excuse they needed in the olden time. The sun rises very, 
very slowly, the shadows still darken the valleys, the clouds 
still obscure it, and sometimes I almost wonder if it will 
not sink again in its orbit in the east and leave the world 
in darkness ; but, on the whole, looking down along the 
centuries, I can see the world is growing wiser and better 
and nobler and truer wherever the Christ has been loved 
and honored. And then I look about me, and wherever I 
find men, not merely professing His name, but where I find 
men and women really loving Him, really trying to honor 
Him, really recognizing Him as Lord and Master, I find 
love transcendent. The tears they still weep in the pres- 
ence of death are no longer the bitter, scalding tears 
they once were ; they are like pearls, radiant every globe 
of them. The followers of the Christ still fall into sin, still 
drop out of life and back into death, and yet they rise 
again with a new courage and a new hope. And the men 
and the women whom I like to meet ; the men and the 
women the grasp of whose hand means something to me ; 
the men and the women whose eyes look up into mine ; 
whose faces are radiant and give me cheer are not mere 
Congregationalists, not mere Ecclesiastics, not merely those 
who profess some special creed, but those who, in one form 



THE HOPE THAT IS IN ME. 53 

or another, are really trying to follow this Christ and really 
love and honor Him. 

And then I come back to my original question, Is there 
a good God at the heart of the universe ? Is He really or- 
dering the world of nature and the world of men ? Is He 
bringing order out of chaos and peace out of war ? What 
is the alternative ? That there is no order ; that this won- 
derful world in which we live is as some gigantic dice-box 
held in some unintelligent hand with the dice thrown down 
upon the table and all the ordered universe the issue of 
that one throw ; that there is no moral order in the uni- 
verse ; that every man is set over against every other man ; 
that there is no secret in life except struggle, struggle, 
battle, battle, selfishness, selfishness, no solidarity and no 
unity of society, of family, state, nation, community, hu- 
manity. Or it is this : If there be a God who has ordered 
nature and who has ordered the world of men, He does not 
care to show Himself ; He hides himself, keeps Himself con- 
cealed, stirs in men the strong passion to find Him, stirs in 
men that longing which our choir interpreted for us a few 
moments ago, makes men pant after him as the heart pant- 
eth after the waterbrooks, makes men cry out to Him, 
" O God, my God, when shall I come before Thee ? " and 
then always hides Himself. Oh, cruel, cruel God if this 
were so ; oh, cruel cruel creed which teaches us to think 
so of Him. 

And so I put these two views of life before myself, a life 
without order in the material universe, a life without order 
in the moral universe, or a life at least without love at the 
heart of it, and then this other view — Love at the heart of 
the universe, Love that has ordered the world. Love that 
is ordering the life of men, Love that is directing a splen- 
did progress, Love that has revealed itself in the one in- 
comparable glory of the one incomparable life — Love that 



54 THE HOPE THAT IS IN ME. 

has done all this that He may reach and bring all men at 
last in to the arms of His love and crown His love with vic- 
tory. 

And from this study of the universe, of the world of men, 
of human history, of the character of Christ, I come back 
to my hope — there is a good God at the heart of the uni- 
verse ; He has ordered the world of matter ; He is ordering 
the world of men ; He is revealing Himself in human his- 
tory ; he speaks to human conscience and human life. 
And when men say to me, If He were all powerful why did 
not He make a better world ? That does not trouble me. 
I do not know that he could have made a better world. I 
do not know that virtue would be possible without vice. I 
do not know how virtue could be possible without the 
possibility of vice. Only I know this : That the hope 
which has grown up in my heart (I know not how), and 
the song which has sung itself in my heart (I know not 
whence), and the hope which has led me on through all 
these years, like the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of 
fire by night, come I know not how into my horizon, is a 
reasonable hope and a right ordered song, a wisely guiding 
pillar, and I press forward in the strong assurance that 
when life's history is over the kingdom of God and not 
the kingdom of the devil will be established in the world, 
and His will, not the will of innumerable myriads of men, 
all willing different things will be accomplished in the 
world, and his will will be done, in me, and I shall awake 
in His likeness, my battle ended, His victory won. 



THE SECRET OF CHARACTER. 

" Which were born^ not of bloody nor of the will of the fleshy nor of 

th ewill ofman^ but of GodP 

{John, i, 13.) 

In these words John deals with the sources of character. 
" Christ," he says, " came unto his own, and his own re- 
ceived him not. But as many as received him, to them 
gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them 
that believe on his name : Which were bom, not of blood," 
nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of 
God." Four sources or springs of character, four grounds 
of expectation of human development, are put here in con- 
trast. Let us look at them : 

True character is not born of blood. It does not de- 
pend upon inheritance. Men are neither great nor good 
merely because they have a great and good ancestry. The 
value of a nation does not depend, fundamentally and 
finally, on its past history, nor on a race. History abun- 
dantly demonstrates that. When John wrote these words'^ 
the Jews prided themselves on being children of Abraham. 
They were born of good blood — and that was enough. 
And nobody could compete with them in character or in 
the race for acceptance with God, because they were born 
of Abraham. " We be children of Abraham," said the 
Jews to Christ. This was enough. At the time these 
words were written there were other men who said • *' We 

55 



56 THE SECRET OF CHARACTER. 

be Romans/' That was enough. *^I am a Roman," was 
the proud boast and the adequate boast. There was nothing 
more to be said. This was the final, the complete, claim. 
And yet the Jewish nation has disappeared as a nation, dis- 
persed among all races. And the Roman nation has dis- 
appeared, broken down, though out of its roots has grown 

\a new race and a new nation. The Englishman is proud 
of being an Englishman. That is enough. The English- 
man's national and personal pride are the subjects of 
numerous jests, and the satires, often originating with one 
of his own people, are significant of a real sentiment among 
our insular brethren. And we laugh at it. We do not 
think it is enough to be a Jew, or enough to have been a 
Roman, or enough to have been an Englishman. But I 
wonder if there are not some of us who think it is enough 
to be an American. The same pride of race crosses the 
ocean and crosses the centuries, and you hear it here to- 
day — ^Uhe American idea," "the American civilization," 
"the American church," "the American religion," "the 
American education," "the American democracy," — put 
the stamp " American " on anything and it is all right. 
No higher praise to be given anything than that it is Ameri- 
can ; no stronger condemnation of anything than that it is 
un-American. Now, too, we are beginning to trace our 
lineage back. We are sons of the Puritans. We are sons 
of the Revolution. We are sons of the Mayflower. And 
some of us are getting across the ocean and trying to 
find ourselves as sons of families back of the Mayflower. 

John says character does not depend on inheritance. 
Inheritance is valuable ; it has its place ; but it is not 

'-^.the foundation of character. A man may be a child 
of Abraham and be degenerate; he may be a Roman, 
and be base ; he may be an Anglo-Saxon, and be mean ; 
he may be an Englishman, and be vicious ; and he may 



THE SECRET OF CHARACTER. 57 

even be an American, and go to pieces. Not only that, 
the whole race of Jews, and the whole race of Romans, and 
the whole race of Englishmen, and the whole race of 
Americans may go to pieces, if all that they depend upon 
is that they are born of good blood. 

Good blood does not make character, and bad blood 
does not destroy it. I shall never forget the conversation I 
had some years ago with one of the best experts in insanity 
in this country. He said to me (and the declaration 
startled me), '^ Insanity is never inherited.'^ And when I 
expressed my surprise, he repeated this affirmation : " In- 
sanity is never inherited." And I said : " What is in- 
herited ? " He replied, ^^ A man may inherit such weakness 
that he will be liable to insanity. But when a man comes 
to me and says : ^ My father was insane and my grand- 
father was insane, and I am afraid I am going to be insane/ 
I say to him : ^ My dear sir, you are the man that ought 
not to be insane, for you have a warning ; you know against 
what you need to guard ; you know how you need to guard 
yourself.' The man whose father and mother and grand- 
father and grandmother were insane is just the man that 
ought not to go insane, for he knows what are his weak- 
nesses, and he knows how to guard himself against them. 
No man ever inherits insanity.** 

No man ever inherited sin. There is not any original 
sin. Men inherit appetites and passions, they inherit 
temptations, they inherit weaknesses and frailties and in- 
firmities, but they do not inherit sin and they do not in- 
herit virtue. Virtue cannot be handed down from fathei*^s^ 
to son. Character cannot be so wrought that it may be 
easier for your son to keep from falling into sin. Weak- 
ness may be handed down, so that it will be easier for 
your son to fall into sin, but virtue is victory by the indi- 
vidual himself over temptation that assails himself, and the 



58 THE SECRET OF CHARACTER. 

victory cannot be won by another and the defeat cannot be 
suffered by another. Men are neither born sinners nor 
born saints. Character does not depend on blood. 

It does not depend on the will of the flesh. Flesh, as 
that term is used in the New Testament, especially by 
Paul, means the animal man. Character does not depend 
upon a strong, virile, vigorous, stalwart will in the man 
^himself. The value of government does not depend on 
strong will, by a king, by an aristocracy, nor yet by a 
democracy. There was a strong government in Rome, and 
Rome went to pieces. There was a strong government in 
France and that went to pieces. Strength of will in an 
enthroned power exerting itself over the community does 
not make a strong, safe, permanent, enduring government. 
I do not know how many years ago (haK a century or 
more) De Tocqueville said : " The peril to America is in the 
great cities,'* and unless America has an armed force, in- 
dependent of the cities, by which it can keep order in the 
cities, I foresee the destruction of the American republic 
from municipal populations. A strong military force, in- 
dependent of the cities, ruled by the state or ruled by the 
nation, and exercising authority over the cities, will not 
prevent the destruction of the nation from foreign and dis- 
orderly populations in the cities. Build your buildings for 
the soldiery as large as you please, make them strong, make 
the windows as narrow, fill them with soldiers as well 
trained, all that may be necessary for protection from 
imminent and impending peril, but that will not save the 
nation. No nation ever yet was saved by a bayonet. No 
nation ever will be saved by a bayonet. No military force 
can protect a nation permanently from the disorder and 
disaster of anarchy. The remedy must go down deeper. 
A strong will and a strong man to exercise the strong will 
cannot make a nation safe. 



THE SECRET OF CHARACTER. 59 

It will not make the home safe. There are plenty of 
fathers who think that the family will be safe if they only 
govern their child well. '' Govern a child in the way he 
should go " is the way they read the passage, "and when 
he is old he will not depart from it; " and they do govern 
him in the way he should go, but he does depart from it. 
It has been the common experience of families over and 
over again. I do not say that children should not be 
governed, but unless the father can do something else than 
govern the child he is a failure. It is not enough to keep 
the boy off the street ; you must make him wish to stay off 
the street. It is not enough to keep him in school ; you 
must make him want the school. It is not enough to pre- 
vent him from smoking or drinking ; you must make him 
hate self-indulgence and sensuality. You must make the 
life and the power within work out. You cannot save him 
by anything that is from without working inward. You 
cannot do this in the nation ; you cannot in the family. 

These two processes, power working from without in re- 
straint, power working from within developing, were set in 
marked contrast in the last century. France was threat- 
ened by revolution, and England was threatened by revolu- 
tion. The same forces exactly were boiling in England as 
in France, and France had a standing army and a Bourbon 
king and a military power, and France exploded. England 
had no such military force to overawe its own population, 
but it had a Protestant church, and it had the Wesleyan 
movement, and it had a great educational movement going 
on within its boundaries, and England developed out of the 
very Chartist elements a larger and a better and a nobler 
life. We did not restore the Union when Lee surrendered 
at Appomattox Court House, we only got a chance to restore 
the Union. If after that surrender South Carolina and 
Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi had still held their 



6o THE SECRET OF CHARACTER. 

old grudge against the North, if no free schools had been 
built up, if no commerce had pressed in, if no manufac- 
turing had followed, if there had been no rebanding to- 
gether man with man, if we had followed the civil war with 
executions and kept the bad blood in our veins we should 
have had a dissevered nation, although one flag had floated 
over us. You cannot make a nation one with a cordon of 
forts and an armed band. Appomattox Court House gave 
us the chance ; but it was the school, the missionary, the 
merchant, the manufacturer, the traveling agent, the sales- 
man, the whole life of the North poured out into the 
South, that knit together the dissevered Union and made 
the nation one. 

What is true of the nation and of the family is true of the 
individual. The strength and the hope of the individual 
is not in a strong, stalwart will. It is a good thing to have 
a strong will. Woe to the father who says : " I will break 
the will of my boy.'' He had better break his back A 
boy without will would better die than live. But, never- 
theless, no man is saved, to use the theological phrase, no 
man is made a man, large, strong, rich, full, splendid, by 
the possession of a strong will. He may be kept from 
certain forms of vice and iniquity, but that does not make 
a man. A strong will is like the armor that soldiers used 
to wear in the olden times. If he only went into battle 
with the armor on, he might not get killed, but he would 
do nothing. He must have a strong arm as well as a strong 
armor. A man with a strong will may be a righteous man, 
but he will not be a good man. A man with a strong will, 
and nothing else, may be a conscientious man, but he will 
not be a holy man ; he will not carry with him the per- 
vasive, sunny, brooding, inspiring influence which comes 
from the fountains of life which spring up within the soul 
itself. 



THE SECRET OF CHARACTER. 6l 

The hope of society and the hope of the individual is 
not in being born of blood (that is, good inheritance), nor 
being born of the will of the flesh (that is, strong will), so 
neither is it in being born of what John calls the will of 
man. The will of the flesh is man simply as an animal, 
strong, vigorous, determined, resolute. But man is higher 
than that ; he is a domestic man, he is a cultivated man, 
an educated man; and the modern equivalent of this 
phrase : " will of man " would be perhaps education. John 
says the world cannot be saved by inheritance, the world 
cannot be saved by strength of character, the world cannot 
be saved by education. 

That is the modern panacea. Go to, we will have an 
educated people. Then it will be all right. It is foolish 
to do wrong. Therefore we will make men rational, and 
then they will cease doing wrong. We have borrowed that 
philosophy from ancient times and imported and incorpo- 
rated it here, and now not a few say we can get along with- 
out churches, without Bible, without worship, without re- 
ligion, without higher institutions, because have we not the 
public schools and (heaven save the mark ! ) the public press. 
Teach men to read and write, then they will be saved. 
Educate them, they will see it is folly to do wrong, and they 
will cease doing wrong. That is the argument. Does it 
succeed? Huxley (I do not quote his words) says that the 
serpent was the subtlest of the beasts of the field, and we 
all know what came of that experiment at the beginning of 
the race. Education is not a panacea. Equip a man with 
all the powers with which education can equip him, and you 
simply give him power with which he can carry on selfish- 
ness more skilfully and more efficiently than before. It 
will put an end to certain forms of sin and put others in 
their place. The educated man will not pick your pocket, 
he will only forge your name ; he will not steal, he will only 



62 THE SECRET OF CHARACTER. 

defalcate. He has learned how to do his robbery, his steal- 
ing, his sin on a larger scale, and with somewhat less chance 
of detection. Teach this American people to read and all 
will go weU with it. Well, we do read, we do write. And 
what is it that we read and write? Take last weeL A 
horrible murder was discovered, and the headless trunk was 
found floating in the river. One of out modem journals 
made a picture of the place and a picture of the crowd look- 
ing on, and a picture of the trunk, with all the marks to 
show where the head was taken off and what limbs were 
gone. Another journal intemewed one who had com- 
mitted a horrible murder only a few months before, and had 
decapitated the \':crlm and hr,d carried the trunk off in one 
quarter and the head in another, intemewed him to get his 
expert judgment as a murderer on the question how this 
newer murder was committed ; and the expert murderer 
was proud of the interview that had been accorded him. 
And this is what we are getting by the simple ability to read 
and write, without the moral ability to discriminate what we 
read and what we write, ^^'e have a little discrimination. 
It is mostly apparent in our wives and our mothers. They 
will not have these journals in the house. So out of respect 
for them we do not subscribe for them, but as soon as we 
go out of the house we buy them of the newsboys and read 
them on the trains. There ought to be such a public senti- 
ment in America, and it ought to go forth from the Christian 
churches, that a man would count himself disgraced if there 
was seen in his hand some papers, which I wlQ not men- 
tion, because I do not care to advertise them. Can you 
not see whither we are going? Can you not see the 
tendency of this vfle journalism? I do not say we shall 
reach the result (God grant that we do not !), but can- 
not you see what it means? First we have yellow cov- 
ered stories that tell all awful horrors. When there has 



THE SECRET OF CHARACTER. 63 

been educated a constituency by that literature and the 
boys and girls have grown to men and women there grows 
up a press that elaborates with great exaggeration all 
suicides, murders, and horrible crimes. Now we are feed- 
ing on those. Do you know what comes next? When 
Rome was no longer satisfied with mimic shows of horror, 
she made real ones. When she was no longer sufficiently 
satisfied with the tragic stories, she made actual tragedies, 
flung over men to wild beasts in spectacular shows that she 
might rejoice in their agonies. That is the way in which 
we are walking. You cannot feed children on yellow 
covered stories without raising men and women that want 
yellow newspapers ; and you cannot feed men and women 
on yellow newspapers without kindling a passion that will 
want tragedy in actual life, and will make it when it does 
not come itself. 

The hope of the world is not in inheritance, not in gov- 
ernment, not in education ; it is in God. Do you know 
what the duty of a minister is ? It is to say the same thing 
Sunday after Sunday, and try so to say it that people will 
listen to him and forget that it is an old story while he is 
saying it. The hope of America, your hope, my hope, is 
not in inheritance. Sons of the Revolution, Daughters of 
the Revolution, Sons of the Mayflower, Daughters of the 
Mayflower, Sons of the Puritans, or in any such thing. It 
is not in strong government, in politics, or in family, or in 
vigorous self-will. It is not in public schools, unless the 
public school learns how to educate the conscience as well 
as the intellect. It is in God who may use all these, and 
through all these may speak to the souls of His children. 
There is no more hope of an Anglo-Saxon race than of a 
Latin race, unless the Anglo-Saxon race gets nearer to God. 
There is no more hope for an American people than for a 
Roman people, unless the American people understand God 



64 THE SECRET OF CHARACTER. 

better than the Romans did. There is no more hope for a 
strong government than for a weak government, unless we 
understand that God is the great Governor and all sanction 
of law comes from His authority. There is no more hope 
in an educated people than in an ignorant people, unless 
their education has taught them right and wrong and God 
as the interpreter of right and wrong, and God's own nature 
as the reservoir of all righteousness from which all life and 
hatred of wrong must come forth. 

Two men sit side by side — in this very congregation per- 
haps. One looks back through a long line of ancestry, 
father, grandfather, great grandfather, running back across 
the sea to splendid progenitors in England. My friend, 
the greatness and goodness of your father will not make you 
great nor good. Many a great man has had a little son, 
and many a noble man has had an ignoble son, and you 
know it. By his side sits another, a child without gene- 
alogy. He knows not where his father or his mother came 
from nor anything of his parentage or his birth. My friend, 
you need not despair of life. Who knows who was the 
father or the mother of Moses that became statesman of 
Israel. Who knows to-day the genealogy of Paul, the 
greatest philosopher of all time, unless Plato be an excep- 
tion. Rise up, take God for your Father and in Him have 
an inheritance that runs beyond all human inheritance. 
Two other men sit side by side. One strong of will. '^ I 
fear nothing,'* he says. *' I smoke to-day, I can cast away 
my cigar to-morrow. I drink to-day, I can give up drink- 
ing to-morrow. I fear nothing ; I can walk in life ; I am 
strong.'* Perhaps you are ; I do not know. Being strong 
may protect you ; but it will not make you a friend, a sym- 
pathizer, a helper of another; you must have something 
deeper and stronger and better than a selfish life for that. 
By his side sits another weak man. He has resolved again 



THE SECRET OF CHARACTER. 65 

and again. Again and again he has broken his resolution. 
His whole life is strewed with broken resolutions. My 
friends, life does not depend on a strong will ; it depends 
on a divinely enforced will and you can have God for the 
asking. Side by side sit two other men. One has had his 
school, his college and his university education, and his 
post-graduate course, and has gone abroad, and knows two 
or three languages. And he is equipped. Yes equipped. 
But what are you going to do with your equipment? That 
is to be answered by your moral and spiritual nature, and 
the larger your equipment the worse your life, if you do 
not know how to use that which you possess. And by his 
side sits another man who can scarcely write at all and 
stumbles in his reading. There is one text for you both : 
Knowledge shall vanish away; but faith, hope and love 
abide forever. You are measured, not by your learning, but 
by the use you make of it. The most influential man of 
all time — think what you may of his divinity — Jesus of Naz- 
areth, was never at a university but one day in his life, and 
had no other schoohng than such as was furnished him by 
the synagogue school at Nazareth. 

Character is not due to inheritance, will-power, culture ; 
it is due to the life of God, wrought by His peace in the 
soul of man. Born, not of blood — inheritance ; not of the 
will of the flesh-government ; not of the will of man — edu- 
cation ; but of the God who is brooding the race, of the 
God who has come into life in Christ, of the God who 
stands at the door of your heart and your life, saying : 
*^ Let me come into you and make you a child of God.'* 
5 



HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. 

** Lordi I believe ; help thou mine unbelief, ^^ 

{Marky ix, 24.) 

This seems to me to interpret the experience of this close 
of the nineteenth century. It is a strangely commingled 
cry of faith and unfaith. There is not, on the one hand, 
the rest and quietness of a clear, simple religious conviction 
unshaken, unhesitatingly held ; there is not, on the other 
hand, the base, despicable, self-satisfaction in a life without 
religious purpose, without spiritual quaUty. It is a state of 
controversy and conflict between faith and unfaith. This 
is its note: "I believe; help thou mine unbelief." 

This quality of the age is interpreted to us by its great 
poets. For the poet of his age is not only its leader, but 
in a truer sense still is he its interpreter. Our great poets are 
religious poets. And yet they are not, for the most part, 
restful religious poets ; in them religion is seen struggling. 
We have not, on the one hand, the purely unreligious po- 
etry of Shakespeare or of Pope, nor have we, on the other 
hand, the unshaken and unquestioning religious faith of 
Milton or of Dante. We have the poetry of a Clough, in 
which faith is underfoot and unfaith is triumphant, and yet 
faith, struggling to overthrow unfaith and rising again. We 
have the poetry of a Matthew Arnold, in which faith and 
unfaith are wrestling with each other, and one wonders which 
will gain the victory. We have the poetry of a Tennyson, 

66 



HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. 67 

in which faith is struggling to emerge, as the sun struggles 
to emerge through the clouds that obscure it. And we have 
the poetry of a Robert Browning, in which faith and unfaith 
are dramatically represented in tremendous conflict, but 
faith always victorious in the end. But in no one of them 
nor in any of our greater American poets, except Whittier, 
have we the restfulness of faith expressed. Even in our 
greatest religious poets — Faber, for example — there is the 
note of conflict, there is the echo of this cry : " I believe ; 
help mine unbeHef." 

Or, if we turn from our poets to a larger survey of the 
world, we see neither rest in religion, on the one hand, nor 
rest in irreligion, on the other. The age is certainly, in one 
sense, a religious age. And yet its prophets are not Thomas 
a Kempis nor Madame Guyon (of pietism and quietism 
there is very little) ; on the other hand its prophets are not 
Thomas Paine nor Voltaire — and though there is a little at- 
tempt to echo Thomas Paine and Voltaire, it is but the 
feeble echo of a past that gets no real hold on human hearts 
and exercises very little influence on human lives. The 
church is no longer on its defense against assailants from 
without, the questionings take place within the church itself. 
And one of the reasons why men who hold fast to the old 
creeds and the old confessions do so is because they fear to 
let them go lest if the symbol be departed from in any 
respect unfaith will come in and take possession of the 
church. Those of us who think we are able to discriminate 
between faith and creed, between life and language, be- 
tween the spirit and the archaic expression of the spirit, 
ought to have great charity, great patience, great tolerance 
toward those who cannot, and who feel that we are the 
enemies of the faith. 

I want, then, to speak this morning to those who are 
struggling for faith ; I want to speak to you as I might 



68 HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. 

speak to a single person, talking with him in my study. I 
imagine him before me. He is in despair ; life has gone 
hard with him; he has failed in everything; he is dis- 
couraged ; he thinks himself of no value. It is in vain to 
tell him to pray — he does not believe in God ; it is in vain 
to tell him to take hope of the future — he does not believe 
in immortality, or at least he does not know whether to be- 
lieve or to disbelieve. The minister is halted at the very 
threshold of his endeavor ; he knows not what to say. Or, 
perhaps, he has had a faith, the old faith of his fathers, and 
he can hold it no longer ; to the creed to which his mother 
subscribed he can no longer himself subscribe ; and yet he 
has vaguely a feeling within himself that there is something 
higher and better than mere material existence. He wishes 
to believe, but will not make believe believe. He wants to 
know. He comes to me (how many there are who have) 
and says, " How do you know there is a personal God ? 
How do you know there is a life beyond the grave? What 
do you think about Christ, and why do you think what you 
do think about Him? " He wants some defining of faith, 
some clear, expHcit interpretation of it. Peter, you remem- 
ber, says, " Add to your faith virtue ; " but suppose we have 
not the faith, what then? The disciples said to the Lord, 
'^ Lord, increase our faith ; " and He said, " If you had 
but faith as a grain of mustard seed." Now, suppose we 
have not faith as a grain of mustard seed, what then? If 
there is not a beginning, how shall we make a beginning? 
If there is not a foundation, how shall we lay the foundation? 
How shall we start to build faith itself ? 

In the first place, my friend, begin by having faith in 
yourself. I think it is a very great mistake, that it has 
sometimes been taught in religious organizations that 
faith in God must rest on unfaith in one's self ; that one 
must disbeUeve in himself in order to believe in God ; that 



HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. 69 

he must be in a self-abased and self -humiliated condition ; 
that he must despair of himself in order to lay hold on the 
Eternal. No, first have faith in yourself. For, if you will 
consider it, that which is characteristic of this age is not so 
much unfaith in God as unfaith in ourselves. There is no 
longer atheism — that is, disbelief in God — there is agnos- 
ticism ; it is that I do not believe that I can know God. 
There is a some one, there is a somewhat, but I cannot 
understand Him. It is not a beUef that there is no God, 
it is a beHef that I have not the capacity to come into per- 
sonal relations with Him. It is unfaith in one's self. 

What is it that stands in the way of moral life ? One 
hundred years ago men did not think drunkenness a vice ; 
indeed, a man was hardly reputable if he did not get drunk 
now and then. To-day drunkenness is universally regarded 
as a vice. But men say, there is no use, you cannot fight 
drunkenness successfully; there will always be drunkards, 
there will always be saloons, it is not worth while to try to 
fight them. It is unfaith in the moral power of men. 
Under Charles II. adultery was not thought a sin. Read 
the dramas — no, do not read the dramas of that age, take 
my word for it that you would mark and see how vice 
entered into the conception of men as their very ideals. It 
was not thought iniquitous that a man should be iniquitous. 
It is now. But what do men say? It is not worth while 
to try to fight licentiousness, you can corral it, you can 
license it, you can restrict it, but you cannot really cure it. 
We have unfaith in ourselves. We disbelieve that we our- 
selves are able to cure vice, that we ourselves are able to 
put down drunkenness, that we ourselves are able to en- 
noble ourselves, that we ourselves are able to bring in the 
kingdom of God. We believe there is a kingdom, or ought 
to be a kingdom, but we doubt whether we can accomplish 
the end. It is unfaith in ourselves. 



70 HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. 

And in personal experience it is the same. It is not dis- 
belief that there is an experience, but it is despair of 
making it personal and real to one's self.« Let me read you 
one short interpretation of this experience of the age from 
Matthew Arnold : 

The thoughts that rain their steady glow 

Like stars on life's cold sea, 
Which others know, or say they know — 

They never shone for me. 

Thoughts light, like gleams, my spirit's sky, 

But they will not remain. 
They light me once, they hurry by ; 

And never come again. 

What is that? DisbeHef in the thoughts? No, disbe- 
lief in the power to get them or the power to keep them or 
the power to live by them. The stars are there, but I can- 
not see them. The sun shines, but it is clouded. There 
is a life, but it is not for me. 

Now my first word is this : Have faith in yourself. Be- 
lieve, and act on the belief. You do not know that you are 
immortal. Very well, do you know that you are not? Act 
as though you were immortal. Take the highest concep- 
tion which you can conceive of yourself and act on it. If 
you do not believe it, live it. You do not know whether 
there is a God, or at all events you do not know whether 
you can know Him. You do not know you can pray to 
Him ; you do not know He will hear you, or that you will 
get an answer. Try the experiment. Believe the highest 
in yourself. Believe you have a voice that will pierce the 
clouds; believe that you have an eye that will see the 
. Eternal. Set yourself to try what you can do with yourself. 
You are discouraged ; life has gone wrong ; you have tried 



HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. 71 

your hand at this and it has failed, and you have tried your 
hand at that and it has failed ; at last you say : There is 
no use in living, I dare not die, what shall 1 do ! Stand on 
your feet and begin again. Have faith in yourself ; that is 
the starting-point. Turn to the Bible and see how it was. 
God comes to Moses, and says : " I have a message for you.'* 
Moses answers, '' Do not send me, I cannot go." And the 
first thing God has to do is to put into Moses, not faith in 
God, but faith in Moses, Moses believes there is a God, 
and Moses believes that Aaron can take the message, but 
he cannot. " No," God says, " I want you to have faith in 
yourself that you can do it — ^you are the one. He comes to 
Isaiah, and says, " Whom shall I send," and Isaiah says, 
" Here am I; send me." He does not have to plead with 
Isaiah, for Isaiah has aith not only in God but also in him- 
self. He comes to Ezekiel ; and Ezekiel, awed by the dis- 
closure of the cherubim, and the firmament and the glory 
of God, falls prone on his face, and the first word of God 
to him is : " Son of man, stand on thy feet and I will speak 
to thee." It is not to the man who is groveling, it is not 
to the man who is despairing, it is not to the man who says : 
" I am good for nothing," that God comes ; it is not to the 
man who has no faith in himself that God speaks, it is to the 
man who believes in himself and in his power and believes 
he can do something. Have faith in yourself ; that is the 
starting-point. 

And then, in the second place, have faith in your fellow- 
men. Honor all men. There are times when that is about 
as difficult a command as any in the Scriptures to comply 
with ; but, nevertheless, there it stands. And there is great 
significance and meaning in it. You can measure hu- 
manity by that which is worst in it ; you can analyze and 
analyze men's motives and try moral vivisection on them ; 
you can try to discover interested motives for every good 



72 HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. 

thing they do, and you can look as little as possible on the 
good and as much as possible on the evil. You can meas- 
ure the press by the corrupt press ; you can measure the 
bar by the dishonest lawyers ; you can measure the bench 
by the judges who seem to render evil decisions ; you can 
measure the ministry by the men who dare not utter their 
honest convictions; you can measure marriages by the 
divorces; you can measure the Sunday-school superin- 
tendent by the one man who now and then is detected in 
dishonesty and condemn the whole Sunday-school system, 
because one man has gone to Canada with somebody else's 
money. You can measure life in that way or you can meas- 
ure it in the other. You can consider the noble men you 
have known and the true men and the worthy men and the 
good things they have done. You can read the corrupt 
press less and the honest press more. You can see what 
is right in men — and there is a great deal that is right. 
You can feed yourself on heroism and purity and truth. 
You can roll the divorce suits under your tongue as a sweet 
morsel, if you will, and lose your faith in man or woman^ 
and you can remember the hundreds of happy homes you 
know and rejoice in domestic peace and domestic purity. 
You can read history in the same way. You can read only 
the story of its corruption and its cruelty. You can meas- 
ure the church in the same w^ay. You can gloat over its 
persecutions, or you can remember its martyred pages. 
You can remember the history of William the Silent and 
Oliver Cromwell and George Washington and Abraham 
Lincoln ; and then when men talk to you with sneer of 
politicians and statecraft, you can reply that some of the 
most influential men who ever trod God's earth were states- 
men and versed in the art of politics. ^' If one love not 
his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God 
whom he hath not seen." What a non-sequitur ! Yes, it 



HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. 73 

a non-sequitur, unless there is something after all divine in 
all men. If you cannot see God, look for Him first in your 
fellow-men ; look for the divine things they do ; look for 
the divine traits and qualities they show. Honor them, 
those qualities in men. 

And then have faith in righteousness. You have tried 
it, and it does not pay. You have been honest, and dis- 
honest competitors have crowded you to the wall in busi- 
ness. You have been candid in the pulpit, and you have 
had a quarrel in the church, and have had to leave it, and 
are without a charge. You have refused to lie in medi- 
cine, and you have been turned off and quacks have come 
in and taken your place. You have refused to resort to 
mean and underhand tricks in the law, and some man who 
was willing to resort to mean and underhand tricks has 
come in and taken off clients from you, and you say 
righteousness does not pay, honesty does not pay, it is not 
worth while. When that third officer of the Champagne 
started with his crew of nine in a life-boat to get help for 
the steamer, do you suppose he went because he thought 
heroism paid? Did he have faith that some overruling 
Providence would so guide and guard and shelter that he 
would not suffer? He knew he should suffer. Did he 
think that some overruling Providence would so guide him 
to his destination, that there would be no danger of death? 
He took the chance of death. Did the hope for a monu- 
ment to his memory, his name the idolized of two nations 
inspire him? It was none of those things. He had faith 
in righteousness ; he had faith in heroism ; he had faith 
in doing his duty. He beheved that to do an heroic thing 
and die for it is better than to live and not have done the 
heroic thing. He believed that to suffer in heroism was 
right and to be comfortable and a coward was shameful. 
Have faith in righteousness. It costs. What would it be 



74 HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. 

worth if it did not cost ! You have suffered. What is a 
man worth who does not sometimes choose to suffer ! 
When in the campaign before Vicksburg Grant called for 
volunteers for a forlorn hope service, nearly the whole regi- 
ment offered, and the question was who should have the 
privilege. When God calls on men and says : I want 
some one to suffer for me, some one to show the world how 
a son of God can bear suffering, and obloquy, how he can 
carry himself when he is misrepresented and abused ; how 
he can endure poverty ; how he can live bereft of his wife 
and children ; how many are there ready to enter his for- 
lorn hope and show their faith in righteousness ? George 
Romanes, scientist, scholar, student, was beginning to lose 
his eyesight, and Canon Scott-Holland wrote him this 
letter : 

It is a tremendous moment when first one is called upon to join 
the great army of those who suffer. That vast world of love and 
pain opens suddenly to admit us one by one within its fortress. We 
are afraid to enter the land, yet you will, I know, feel how high is 
the call. It is as a trumpet speaking to us that cries aloud, " It is 
your turn — endure." Play your part. As they endured before you, 
so now, close up the ranks — be patient and strong as they were. 
Since Christ, this world of pain is no accident untoward or sinister, 
but a lawful department of life with experiences, interests, adventures, 
hopes, delights, secrets of its own. These are all thrown open to us 
as we pass within the gates — things that we could never learn or 
know or see, so long as we were well. God help you to walk through 
this w^orld now open to you as through a kingdom, regal, royal, and 
wide and glorious. 

I wonder if in this house this morning there is some one 
bearing a heavy burden. Of course there is some one. 
I wonder if there is some one suffering and losing faith in 
his God and faith in himself and faith in the world of men 
because he is suffering unjustly. This is my prayer for 
you : ^* God help you to walk through this world now open 



HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. 75 

to you as through a kingdom, regal, royal, wide and glo- 
rious." 

Have faith in righteousness, and have faith in the Christ 
who embodies and personifies and represents this right- 
eousness, and this faith in men, and this faith in one's 
self. You do not know whether He was Divine ; well, pass 
that. You do not know whether He wrought miracles; 
pass that. You do not know whether He rose from the 
dead ; pass that. You do not know whether he was mi- 
raculously born ; pass that. You do not know whether he 
lived at all ; pass that. Take the picture, read the story, 
then believe that such a life as He lived is a life worth liv- 
ing ; that such a life as He is said to have lived is a life 
worth living ; such heroism, such patience, such gentleness, 
such courage, such life, is the only life worth living. Be- 
lieve in righteousness and in the life that he lived, and then 
rise up and try to live it. 

And, finally, have faith in the testimony of others who 
have seen what you do not see and have known what you 
do not know. We do not all walk by sight. Believe in the 
good God because men have known Him, though you have 
not known Him. Did you ever see Gladstone? Do you 
believe in him? Did you ever see George Washington? 
Do you beHeve in him? Believe on the testimony of others 
in the spiritual realm as you believe in the other realm. 
Oh, how in other things we act on the slightest intimation 
of a witness, and in religion wait to examine and cross- 
examine ! A policeman last week found a poor unconscious 
Italian, got him on his shoulder, ran twelve blocks through 
the sleet and snow, dropped him on the floor of a drug 
store, and called instantly for the medicine he wanted and 
poured it down his throat, and the drug clerk did not stop 
and say : ''Are you a doctor? Have you a prescription? 
Where is your evidence? " but gave the medicine to him ; 



76 HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. 

and when the doctor came the poor ItaUan was sitting up, 
pale and trembUng, but restored to Ufe, because one man 
was wilHng to act on the counsel and judgment of another 
man. Last week a fire occurred in Cambridge, and a stu- 
dent was caught by the flames in the fourth story, and his 
fellow-students spread out a blanket and called out to him 
to jump. He could hardly see through the flames and 
smoke, but he sprang from the window sill, and was saved 
though not uninjured, because he trusted in the word of 
others. I could go right through this congregation and 
could call up men and women I see before me and they 
would say to you : *^ I know there is a God ; I have talked 
with Him ; He has carried my burden ; He has carried my 
sorrow ; He has comforted me in it ; He has carried my 
sin ; He has taken it away ; He has carried my iniquity ; 
He has cleansed it away." Now, you do not know there is 
not a God. Act on the knowledge of others. If you can- 
not do anything else pray this prayer of the atheist ; " O 
God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul.*' 
That is better than nothing. It is the cry of a man who 
wants help. 

When those men were tossing to and fro in the boat and 
saw the steamer pass by, did they know it would stop for 
them? They did not wait for the proof and demonstra- 
tion ; they shouted and threw up their signals. Here is a 
long row of witnesses, by the hundreds and the millions, 
who bear their testimony ; He has borne our sins ; He 
has carried our iniquity ; He has taken off our burden ; 
He has taken the sorrow out of our heart ; He has put a 
new song on our lips. Run up your signal ; you do not 
know where He is? Throw up your arm; trust the voices 
of men who say to you that on this great ocean of life where 
you are tossing and think you are alone, you are not alone. 
We have been where you are; we have given out our 



HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. *J*J 

signal j the active arm has been reached out to us ; we have 
been helped. 

If you have come here this morning wishing you be- 
lieved, wishing you had faith, and not having it, do not 
make believe you believe ; do not try to repeat a creed you 
do not think is true ; do not try thus to vanquish your doubts. 
Believe in yourself ; look for the best in your fellow-men ; 
believe in righteousness, and follow it wherever it leads ; 
believe at least so far in the Christ as this : believe that His 
life is a life worth living, and then take the testimony of 
others, and on that testimony seek help from the great 
Helper. 



HINDUISn VERSUS CHRISTIANITY. 

" He that hath my cominandments^ and keepeth theniy he it is that 
loveth me ; a7zd he that loveth me, shall be loved of my Father, and I 
will love him, and will mafzifest myself to him." (/ohn, xiv. 21.) 

America has become missionary ground for other relig- 
ions. Perhaps instigated by the ParHament of Rehgions, 
at all events following upon it we have had foreign mis- 
sionaries from India preaching the Oriental faith ; and it 
is said that there are many hundreds, perhaps thousands, 
who are studying (if the somewhat superficial listening to 
lectures can be called study) this Oriental religion. 

I am glad of it. In the first place, I am glad of it, be- 
cause I think we have something to learn from Hinduism. 
Our rushing, vehement, struggling life in America has some- 
thing to learn from the patience and the quietism of the 
Orient. And I am more glad of it, because I am glad to 
have Christianity and Orientalism put side by side in sharp 
contrast. I should not be sorry to see a Brahmanical tem- 
ple, a Vedantic school of philosophy and a Mohammedan 
mosque in the same American city. I should not be sorry 
to see the Koran and the religious books of India and the 
Bible put side by side on the same table. If Christianity 
cannot endure the contrast, then it ought not to live. I 
believe there is no better way to attest its value than by 
simply putting Christianity and the other forms of religious 
faith in the world side by side, each interpreted by its own 
interpreter. 

78 



HINDUISM VERSUS CHRISTIANITY. 79 

I am not proposing, then, this morning, to attack or to 
criticise Orientalism^ but to try to do this very thing — to 
put Orientalism and the Christian religion side by side be- 
fore you, as far as it is possible to do it within the limits of 
a single brief discourse. 

Orientalism exists in many different forms, and they are 
very different — Brahmanism, Buddhism, Vedantism, Theo- 
sophical philosophy, not to mention others — and they are 
often confounded; naturally enough^ by Americans. But 
Christianity also exists in many very different forms — Ro- 
manism, Lutherism, Anglicanism, Puritanism, Wesleyanism j 
and these are also very often confounded by our brethren 
across the sea, naturally enough. I do not propose this 
morning to speak of Brahmanism or Buddhism or Vedant- 
ism any more than I speak of Romanism or Lutherism or 
Puritanism. There are certain fundamental features which 
all Oriental religions and all Oriental philosophies have in 
common, and there are certain fundamental features which 
all Christian forms of religion have in common, and it is of 
these common features, and of the contrast between the two 
that I wish to speak this morning. 

In the first place, then, the Oriental religions are what is 
called pantheistic — the doctrine of all the Oriental religions, 
and of all the philosophies which pass for religion, are that 
God is the only reality. This is, indeed, shaped and 
fashioned in different forms, but it is practically always the 
same in its result. God is the sum of all phenomena. God 
is the all and the all are God. That is one form of stating 
it. Or, God is the only reality, and all phenomena, the 
varied phenomena of life, are only shadows, unrealities, ap- 
pearances, semblances. I am not I ; I am only a fragment 
of the Deity, and 1 only appear to myself to be, while in 
reality I am not ; 1 am only a kind of shadow, cast out by 
the Deity. Or, God is the only Eternal, and all phenomena 



8o HINDUISM VERSUS CHRISTIANITY. 

are emanations that proceed from Him ; they float a little 
while upon the surface and return to Him again. All men 
and all material creation are like the foam on the wave ; 
it rises, then goes down, then is absorbed again into the 
great eternal flow. In one of these forms or the other all 
Oriental religions are based on the notion that God is the 
only eternal reality and that all men and all material things 
are unrealities, shadows, temporal and transient. 

And because God is thus the eternal reality and includes 
in himself all things. He is without attributes. He is not 
a person, and He has none of the qualities that belong to 
personality. He cannot love, because there is nothing for 
Him to love and nobody for Him to love. He is the all. 
Were he to love me He would only love Himself. Were 
He to love you it would only be self-love. He cannot 
know, for knowledge assumes both the person that knows 
and the thing that is known ; but there is nothing for Him 
to know, all things are Himself. There is, therefore, no 
knowledge apart from Him, in any Occidental and Ameri- 
can sense of the term knowledge. There are no hopes in 
God, and no fears in God, for there is no future, there are 
no contingencies. He is simply eternal silence, hardly self- 
conscious existence. 



HINDUISM VERSUS CHRISTIANITY. 8 1 

Nirvana or rest. It is a question among scholars whether 
Nirvana, the Heaven of the Oriental, is existence or an- 
nihilation. I think I should define it as unconscious ex- 
istence. I suspect you do not know what that means ; I 
do not quite know, I think; but it is, at all events, some- 
how to be and yet not to know that one is ; the absence of 
all desire, of all expectation, of all energy, of all forth- 
putting, of all things that we call life. And, therefore, 
here and now, religion is the absence of these things. To 
be religious, according to the Oriental philosophy, is not to 
go forth to serve men, it is to meditate. It is to separate 
one's self from the world, it is to separate one's self from 
mankind, it is to be absorbed in God. And we are to 
come into this oneness with God, not by going forth, but 
by meditating on God, thinking about God, shutting the 
world ofl from ourselves, that we may finally be absorbed 
and brought back into God again. And so, until within 
the last quarter century at least, this religion never has 
been a missionary religion. The Oriental religions — if I 
except Buddhism — never have attempted to make converts ; 
they have not gone forth, you have noticed, because the 
very essence of their religion has been not to go forth, but 
to retreat; not to go forth, but to remain in perpetual 
silence. Life is not a going forth but it is being absorbed 
back into the perpetual silence. 

Now over against that conception of religion — God the 
all, phenomena, including human life, shadows and un- 
realities, religion an absorption in God, not a forth-put- 
ting for service, and Heaven unconscious existence, I wish 
to put before you, very rapidly and very briefly, the essential 
elements of Christianity, as they stand in contrast with 
Orientalism, and the essential element of all forms of 
Christian faith, as they stand in contrast with all forms of 
Orientalism. 
6 



82 HINDUISM VERSUS CHRISTIANITY. 

In the first place, then, our Christian faith — and by our 
Christian faith I include Jewish as well as Christian, the 
faith of the Old Testament and the New, the faith of the 
Hebrew and the Christianized Greek, and the Christianized 
world — the fundamental faith is, God is love. That is the 
starting-point. He is not power ; He is not thought ; He 
is not pure imagination — God is love. And because God 
is love, therefore, God is always putting forth from Him- 
self. The Oriental God is absorbing into Himself. The 
Christian God and the Hebrew God is putting out from 
Himself. The two conceptions of Deity stand in contrast 
and antagonism one to the other. It is sometimes said 
that a Vedantist or a Theosophist can be a Christian, 
Well, perhaps he can, because a man may be a very good 
follower of Christ and a very poor logician, but as systems 
of philosophy they stand antagonistic one to another at the 
very center and source. The one represents God as taking 
everything into himself and the final end only God, and 
the other represents God as pushing out from himself more 
and more, creating, producing, giving forth. God is love, 
not absolute thought, not absolute power, absolute benefi- 
cence. 

And because God is love and God is a living God there- 
fore, there are those whom He can love, and, therefore. He 
is making those whom He can love. God would not be 
God if He could not love, and therefore God would not be 
God if there were not persons separate from Him. Pan- 
theism is not atheism. It is not the same as atheism. It 
can hardly be said to run into atheism. But in this it is 
alike with atheism, that it is absolutely inconsistent with 
the doctrine that God is love. For if God is love. He loves 
somebody; and if He loves somebody, then there are 
somebodys that are separate from Him and not fragments 
of Him. One could conceive of God as existing in the 



HINDUISM VERSUS CHRISTIANITY. 83 

remote eternity, when there were no angels or archangels, 
when there were no men or women. Still, like a childless 
wife, He may love and wait until the time when children 
are born whom He may take into His arms, and who will 
fill His heart. You and I, and such as you and I, are es- 
sential to the life of God. I desire to say it, though men 
may call it irreverent ; you and I and such as you and I 
are essential to the life of God. For God is Father, and 
there is no father if there be no children. Lame they may 
be and impotent they may be, and foolish they may be, 
and half -educated they may be, and sinful and erring they 
may be ; but children are essential to the Eternal Father, 
and there can be no God who loves if there be not men 
and women separate from God, living by themselves, having 
their own individual personality, whom He can love and 
does love. 

And because God is love, and is a living God, and has 
put forth from Himself children whom He may love. He 
shows them, He reveals to them, He utters to them His 
love. The God of the Hebrews and the God of the 
Greeks — that is, as I believe, the God of the whole world, 
the God who is interpreted to us, if you will, by the Hebrew 
conception and by the Christian revelation, is a God who 
not only loves, but interprets, manifests, shows forth His 
love. The world is not a shadow. You and I are not 
shadows. There is not a screen on which the false pretense 
is cast that passes away and is gone. God puts forth all 
things that through them He may speak His love. Crea- 
tion is gift-giving. Because it is His nature to be putting 
forth He made all the world for us and such as we are. 
He makes it as a man builds a house and gives it to his 
bride or to his child to live in. It is the testimony of his 
love. 

He speaks of love by deeds. He is a doing God, there- 



84 HINDUISM VERSUS CHRISTIANITY. 

fore ; not a sleeping and unconscious God. And this do- 
ing God is a speaking God, and comes and speaks to the 
prophets of olden time, to all men that will hear Him, and 
to the nation that above all other nations on the earth will 
better hear Him. It hears Him, although it misunder- 
stands Him, it misinterprets Him, it misreports Him. 
Sometimes it keeps its message to itself and will not give it 
forth. But still there is the great prophetic nation that 
gets a conception of a God who is a Father, God who is 
love, God who is greater because He is love. And to this 
nation He speaks this love, and through this nation He 
speaks it to other nations. And then because He is love, 
and because He is making a nation in love, and because 
He is showing His love through human experience, that is 
not enough, and He comes and lives a human life, mani- 
festing Himself in the terms of a human experience, that 
man may understand what love means. Sometimes we 
wonder that Christ did not show forth more divine power. 
Now and then sparks seem to fly from Him for a moment, 
a force more than human, and to disappear, but on the 
whole He walked a man like other men. Sometimes we 
wonder that He did not show more wisdom. Why was it if 
Moses did not write the Pentateuch, He did not tell us so ? 
Why was it if the Psalms were not all written by David, He 
did not tell us so? Why was it if the world was to run 
eighteen centuries after his birth before redemption, and 
no one knows how many centuries more, He did not tell 
us so ? Strange that He did not know and did not reveal ! 
And yet, my friends, if He had come with resplendent and 
dazzling power, if He had come with marvelous and all- 
speaking wisdom, we should have forgotten the love. 
Then we should have admired Him for the power ; then we 
should have admired Him for the learning. Now they 
are not there ; the one central thing is all that is left, and 



HINDUISM VERSUS CHRISTIANITY. 85 

it is all that needs to be left ; is the one thing we need to 
know — God is love. 

And because God is love, and God is a living God, and 
God has made His children that He may have some ones 
that He may love, and because God has manifested Him- 
self and revealed Himself as love to other hearts of love, 
therefore, religion consists in loving, in serving, in doing 
things, not in meditating. Religion does not consist in 
meditating about God, but it consists in living the kind of 
life God lives Himself. It does not consist in separating 
one's self from the world, but coming into the world. The 
central truth of Christianity is the truth of Incarnation ; 
and the doctrine of Incarnation is exactly this : That God 
comes into the world, and, then, coming into the world. 
He says to you and to me, ^' Follow thou me ! " The man 
or woman who goes into a nunnery, monastery or convent, 
the man and woman who separate themselves from their 
family or their kith and kin or their race are just in so far 
acting on the Oriental reUgion, not on the Christian religion. 
To be religious is to go into the world and carry in the 
world the spirit of activity and service and love. The 
Messiah of the Vedantist is one named Ramakvishna. 
Let me read one beautiful figure borrowed from his writ- 
ings : 

" So long as the bee is outside the petals of the flower, it buzzes 
and emits sounds. But when it is inside the flower, the sweetness 
thereof has silenced and overpowered the bee. Forgetful of sounds 
and of itself, it drinks the nectar in quiet. Men of learning, you too 
are making a noise in the world, but know the moment you get the 
slightest enjoyment of Bahkti (love of God) you will be like the bee 
in the flower, inebriated with the nectar of divine love." 

That is the most beautiful expression I can find of the 
religion of Orientalism. Stop ! and enjoy nectar. But 
wlicn I turn to the New Testment I find a very different 



86 HINDUISM VERSUS CHRISTIANITY. 

doctrine. It is this : Get your honey from the flower, and 
then take it out, carry it forth, hive it, give it to others. 
Go into the flower that you may get pollen on your wings 
and go forth to fructify other flowers. Religion is not 
staying all the time in the flower. It is not being in- 
ebriated with spiritual nectar. That is distinctly irrelig- 
ious ; at all events, it is un-Christianity. To be a Christ- 
ian is not at all to be absorbed in God. That is irrelig- 
ious. To be religious is to take God into ourselves, and 
then carry Him out to others. It is to give the nectar to 
the unfed and not stay and inebriate ourselves w^th it. 
We have Orientalism in some of our religious hymns. '' I 
will sit and sing myself away to everlasting bliss " — that is 
Orientalism ; it is not Christianity. To be a Christian is 
to take the bhss, to take the life, and give it in service to 
those that need it. 

And so a church is not a Christian church that is not a 
missionary church. If the church is satisfied to come to- 
gether once a Sunday or twice a Sunday, or six or seven 
times a w^eek in protracted meeting, for singing, prayer 
and exultation and exhilaration and absorption in God, it 
is an Oriental church, it is not a Christian church. It is 
not a Christian church unless, coming to the sanctuary and 
getting through the church a larger vision of God, a larger life 
of Him, a better sense of His love and more of His spirit, it 
goes forth to carry it to those who need that life and that 
love, as Christ came forth from God, and as through the 
eternities God has been coming forth from Himself. 

The Oriental figure is this (it is a very common one in 
the Oriental writings) : God the great ocean ; from the 
ocean rises the cloud the cloud falls on the hillside, comes 
out from the mountain as a spring, flows through rills into 
the river, flows down the river back into the ocean again 
and is absorbed. That is the Oriental religion. 



HINDUISM VERSUS CHRISTIANITY. 87 

And the Christian rehgion is this : God is a Sun of 
Righteousness. And from God the sunHght pours out 
upon the world; and the world itself, in turn, illuminates 
others; and all the life and all the beauty and all the 
fragrance and all the sunshine and everything comes from 
its receiving and giving back the light. Do you know the 
difference between a diamond and charcoal? They are 
both carbon. The charcoal absorbs the light and does not 
give any back. The diamond takes the light and gives it 
all back. The charcoal is Vedantism. The diamond is 
Christianity. The one absorbs God and is absorbed by 
Him. The other takes Him only that it may bestow Him 
upon others. And so, my friends, if you and I want to 
find God, if we are Christians, if we beHeve in this Bible, 
and not in the Oriental philosophy, our way to find Him is 
by Christian activities. It is not by getting out of the 
world, it is not by shutting ourselves up away from the 
world, it is not by meditating on unworldly things. We 
are to go where God is — and God is where there is need 
and trouble and sorrow ; we are to be doing the things 
that God is doing — and God is carrying help and comfort 
and strength to those who are in trouble and sorrow. 

I suppose some of you have been wondering what has 
become of my text. Let me read it again. "He that 
hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that 
loveth me ; and he that loveth me, shall be loved of my 
Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him. 
If a man love me, he will keep my words ; and my Father 
will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our 
abode with him." Do you want to know what His com- 
mandment is? "This is my commandment: That you 
love one another as I have loved you." 

You who are in business sometimes say : " I wish I 
were a minister and could have the quiet time for medita- 



88 HINDUISM VERSUS CHRISTIANITY. 

tion; then, perhaps, I might be a devout man." I will 
tell you how to get the vision of God. Carry the spirit of 
love into your counting-room. If you who are a lawyer say : 
" How shall I find God ? I cannot cut myself off from 
the activities of life." I will tell you how to do it. Re- 
member that God is personified justice, and in the admin- 
istration of law remember that you are doing divine work 
in the world, and do it with Him. The baker that dis- 
tributes bread is as truly working with Christ, if he only 
knows it, as the preacher who preaches in the pulpit ; for 
Christ distributed bread to the hungry as well as preached 
on the mountain top. To be one with God is to love and 
serve and live, for God is love and service and life. 

I am glad the Oriental religions are sending their mis- 
sionaries. I am glad they are telling us that there is only 
one God and all things are shadows and that the end of 
life is absorption into God. And I am glad to put in con- 
trast these two conceptions : God the All; and God send- 
ing forth the all and creating the all that He may love 
those whom He has created. God absorbing all into 
Himself ; and God creating personality and enlarging it 
with His own personahty that from eternity to eternity He 
may love and be loved. ReHgion, meditation ; and religion, 
life and love and service. Heaven, eternal, imconscious 
rest; and Heaven an eternal life of splendid and ever- 
increasing activities. 



THE CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD. 

''''Fear not^ little flock ; for it is your Father's good pleasure to give 
you the kingdom T 

(Lukey xi, 32.) 

About eighteen centuries ago, a little band of twelve, 
with a Leader, who had chosen them to be His compan- 
ions, were traveling through one of the provinces of Rome. 
They believed — and in that age it was a radical belief — 
that there was a good God who ruled the world and was 
going to bring order out of chaos and righteousness out of 
wrong. They believed, too, in their Leader, though they 
did not understand Him. What He said they thought was 
true; what He commanded they were ready to obey; 
whither He led, they desired to follow. He was surely 
worthy of their credence ; for He never said anything for 
effect, never anything simply because He thought it would 
sound well or do good ; but only what He believed to be 
the truth, and the absolute truth. He never commanded 
them except by the enunciation of laws which He inter- 
preted in His own life and character ; He never asked 
them to go whither He was not willing to lead ; and He 
never laid on them burdens which He was not ready Him- 
self to carry. They loved Him, though they did not under- 
stand Him. It was this Leader who uttered these words to 
this little band of twelve : "Fear not, little flock; for it is 
your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." 

89 



90 THE CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD. 

It was a wonderful choice, this choice of these peasant 
men to receive the gift of the kingdom ; wonderful when you 
consider what that kingdom seemed to be to the Leader 
who promised it. It was interpreted afterward by one of 
His disciples: ^^The kingdoms of this earth shall become 
the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ." Fear not, 
little flock ; it is your Father's good pleasure to give you 
the kingdoms of the earth. That was the promise. He 
made it clear to them. The whole world, He said, is your 
vineyard ; go, sow everywhere ; go, preach the same glad 
tidings, the same hope that animates you preach to every 
creature in every part of the world. You are but the least 
of seeds, it is true, but you shall grow until at last the or- 
ganization of which you are the beginning has overspread 
the world. You are but a little leaven, it is true^ hidden 
away in three measures of meal ; men do not see you, they 
do not know what is coming from you ; but go, and your 
agitating presence shall go on and on until it has pervaded 
the whole world and the whole world is changed by your 
presence in it. 

From that time to this the organization has been grow- 
ing. The parable has been fulfilled. The little seed has 
grown to be like a great tree that overspreads the globe. 
The little band of twelve has now grown to such propor- 
tions that it is counted by millions. The little band of 
twelve that had no purse nor scrip, nor even so much as 
two changes of raiment apiece when they went forth on 
their travels, is now endowed with wonderful equipment. 
There are no edifices in the world more splendid than some 
of the edifices which this band has constructed. There are 
no schools of learning better than those which this fellow- 
ship has endowed. It has spread over the globe, so that 
to-day there is scarcely any language in which the praise 
of this Leader is not sung ; there is scarcely any commu- 



THE CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD. 9I 

nity in which His word is not proclaimed ; there is scarcely 
any spot on which the sun shines where men do not gather 
to honor His name, and to strengthen themselves the bet- 
ter to do His service. The influence has gone out from this 
band and overruns its boundaries. Belief in this Leader, 
belief in this good God that rules the world is no longer 
confined within the successors of this twelve. It runs far 
beyond, so that now it is difficult to tell who are within the 
fellowship and who are without it, because the creed of this 
Christian church has become the creed of every Christian 
community, and the principles of this Christian church are 
in some measure at least accepted by those who do not 
pretend to belong to it. 

It is true that the prosperity and progress of this fellow- 
ship is its peril. It is true that while it has been pushing 
its influence out into the world, the influence of the world 
has been pushing itself into the organization. It is true 
that while the world has been growing more Christian, 
the church and the press have been growing more worldly, 
but it is also true that this organization, this band, this 
fellowship is to-day larger and more splendid in its endow- 
ment, in its equipment, in its edifices, and in its influence than 
any organization that is or ever was upon the globe. It has 
survived the centuries ; it has survived persecution attack- 
ing it ; it has survived schism and controversy rending it 
from within ; it has survived corruption eating out its vitals 
at the very heart of it. It is broken up into fragments, ap- 
parently, and yet it is really still one ; and though empires 
have changed, and governments have changed, and civili- 
zation has changed, and literature has changed, and the 
whole world in its very structures and organization has 
changed through these eighteen centuries, this little band, 
starting under this Leader, loyal to Him and full of love for 
Him, not understanding Him, but willing to go where He 



92 THE CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD. 

led, and to do what He told them to do, has survived all 
the ages and lives still with the same great essential faith 
and the same great fundamental principles. 

Some of us in this church belong to this band, and some 
of us do not ; some of us are of this fellowship, and some 
are not. I want to try to tell you this morning what, it 
seems to me, are some of the characteristics and features 
of the little flock, grown to be so large a flock ; what we 
mean by the church of Christ ; what we are. 

In the first place, we have one common faith. I know 
our creeds differ ; I know that we have quarreled and con- 
tended over definitions ; but one faith is common — we all 
believe, Protestant and Catholic, liberal and conservative, 
that there is one good God, and that He is the Father of 
the whole human race, bringing order out of chaos and 
peace out of contention and righteousness out of wrong. 
We beHeve not only that God is, but that God is in His 
world working out its redemption, and we believe in Jesus 
Christ whom He hath sent. We understand Him better 
than the twelve understood Him. We know what He 
means better than they knew what He meant ; we compre- 
hend both His mission and His character far better than 
they did. We have come to see in Him the reflection of 
the Infinite and the Eternal, to understand through His pas- 
sion, through His suffering, through all the various phases 
of His life, the life of the Infinite and the Eternal. 

We believe, also, that this Christ is a living Christ ; that 
He is in the heart of His church ; that He dwells with us ; 
that He is not dead ; that He is still as truly our Leader as 
He was the Leader of those twelve in their earthly minis- 
try. And we believe that in Him and through Him there 
is forgiveness of sins. We believe that He is taking the 
load of iniquity off the world, not only the burden of the 
past, not only the affliction of the present, but the curse of 



THE CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD. 93 

the future. We believe that He is washing and cleansing; 
that He is redeeming and purging ; that He is emancipat- 
ing and freeing the world ; that He is lifting it up by slow 
process, but really lifting it up and making a new created 
world out of it. We beHeve in God the Father, in Jesus 
Christ, whom He hath sent ; in the Holy Spirit, the spirit 
of God dwelling in the hearts of the children of men, in the 
forgiveness of sins, in the Holy Catholic Church, the fellow- 
ship of the saints, the communion of those who are banded 
together in this common faith. 

It is true- — I say again — we differ on many points. Some 
of us believe in an infallible church, and some believe in 
an infallible book, and some believe in an infallible reason, 
and some do not believe in anything infallible. Some are 
radical, and some conservative ; some are tied more to the 
past, and some are pressing forward more eagerly to the 
future. But Catholic and Protestant, liberal and conserva- 
tive, all hold these great fundamental elements ; there is 
a good God, a Jesus Christ, whom He hath sent ; a Holy 
Spirit dwelling in the church, a work of redemption, of up- 
building, of development, of education, carried on in the 
world by God, and by the church commissioned to carry it 
on for Him. 

We have a common hope as well as a common faith. 
The future is ours. We believe in it. We look forward to 
the time when war shall cease; when the white-winged 
squadron shall no longer go forth sailing the sea, carrying 
their cannon with them to belch fire and destruction ; when 
armed men shall no longer tramp the earth, organized, only 
to bring ravage and ruin and despair upon the children of 
men. We look forward to the time when all the nations 
shall clasp hands together in a common fraternity, and na- 
tion shall love nation as brother loves brother. We look for- 
ward to the time when labor shall everywhere be adequately 



94 



THE CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD. 



remunerated; when, though there may still be poverty, 
there shall be no pauperism ; when no men shall go hungry 
or unfed or uncared for ; when wealth shall be so far equi- 
tably distributed that everpvhere there shall be comfort 
without the perils of luxury. We look forward to the time 
when commerce shall no longer be a battle of man against 
man ; when no longer men shall ill-treat one another and 
prey upon one another and crowd one another out of the way, 
as the children crowd one another in Italy when the traveler 
flings down a handful of coin for them. We look forward 
to the time when commerce shall everywhere be free, and 
man shall not reach out his hand except to clasp his neigh- 
bor's hand in fellowship, and all trade and all industry shall 
be mutually helpful and mutually supporting. We look 
forward to the time when government shall be an endeavor 
— an honest and a sincere endeavor — by men to find out 
what righteousness is, and what God's law is, and to en- 
throne conscience in the nation, and make a social con- 
science, as now conscience is enthroned in many an individ- 
ual and made a personal conscience. We look forw^ard to 
the time when education shall seek only the highest and 
di\inest, and in all its seeking still shall seek after God and 
God's righteousness. Sometimes we turn to this old book. 
We read the story of our hope therein. It is no dim, vague, 
imaginative picture that we read. It is the expression of 
our strong expectation. " For all the armor of the armed 
man in the tumult, and the garments rolled in blood, shall 
even be for burning, for fuel of fire." We look forward to 
the time when every gunship shall carry peace, and guns no 
longer ; when it shall be as rare to see a fort at a harbor as 
now it is to see a portcullis at the entrance of a home ; 
when it shall be as rare to see an armed troop to protect 
the nation as it is, in a civilized community, to see a pistol 
in a hip-pocket to protect an individual. All the armor of 



THE CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD. 95 

the armed man and all the garments rolled in blood shall 
be burned in one great bonfire. '' For unto us a child is 
born, and unto us a Son is given, and the government shall 
be upon his shoulders, and he shall be called Wonderful, 
Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of 
Peace." Or, sometimes we turn to our hymn-book and 
sing of our hope and our aspiration which becomes more 
than an earnest expectation. 

Oh ! for the coming of the end, 

The last long Sabbath day of time, 
When peace from Heaven shall descend. 

Like Heaven's own light, on every clime ! 
When men in ships far off at sea. 

Shall hear the happy nations raise 
The song of peace and liberty. 

The chant of overflowing praise. 
Mankind shall be one brotherhood ; 

One human soul shall fill the earth ; 
And God shall say. The world is good 

As in the day I gave it birth. 

United with this faith, united in this hope, we are united 
in our purpose. We have joined together and pledged 
one another our mutual loyalty in the endeavor to main- 
tain this duty. We have given our pledge of helpfulness 
one to another. In us still is the spirit of war and greed 
and selfishness and ambition and pride, and we know it full 
well. But we have agreed one with another that we will 
help one another in personal battle. Each one of us will 
help his neighbor, he will help you, and you will help him, 
and each of us will help the other to stand strong. We will 
be more honest in business, we will be more loyal in govern- 
ment, we will be truer in politics, we will be kinder in the 
household, we will be better men and women, because we 



96 THE CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD. 

know other people are fighting the same battle, doing the 
same work, running the same race, giving us their sjin- 
pathy, as we are gi\ing them ours. We have joined our 
hands in a common pledge to do what we can for the world. 
We have united for the purpose of telling others of this 
Leader, and of this life. We see about us men who are 
in discouragement and despair ; men who think you must 
fall into the currents of society- and do as society does ; that 
it is impossible to be honest, di\inely honest in commerce, 
as it is carried on to-day ; men who are under such stress 
and pressure that they say. It is no use, I must either join 
in the current or be trampled under foot. And we have 
joined hands to say. It is false, God does reign, there is a 
good God, the sunshine is more than the blast, God is more 
than the de\'il, goodness and righteousness are more than 
sin and selfishness. We can and we will conquer, and the 
kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our 
Lord and of His Christ. We come to this promise : '^ Fear 
not, little flock ; for it is your Father's good pleasure to give 
you the kingdom.'* We remember it was said to the twelve, 
and now it is said over again to millions, that are no longer 
a Httle flock, and we take courage. We have united for 
this our common purpose that we may hasten the time when 
there shall be peace in place of war, love in place of selfish- 
ness, industry in place of idleness, thrift in place of extrav- 
agance, and the spiritual life in place of the sensuous life. 

Our homes teach us much. We grow weary of the con- 
flict of life and come back and open that door, and there 
the wife is trying to carry the husband's burden and the 
husband is trying to carr}* the wife's burden ; there the 
children are seeing what they can do for the father and the 
mother, and the father and mother are seeing what they 
can do for the children ; and life is joyous because life is 
love ; and we look forward to the time when the law of the 



THE CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD. 97 

household will be the law of the city, the law of the nation, 
the law of the world. We have that hope. We have the 
purpose to achieve that hope. 

We have a Leader ; not a dead leader, either — a living 
leader ] a leader who is as truly a leader now as He ever 
was to the twelve of old j a leader as loyal to us as He was 
to them ; a leader who knows a great deal better than we 
know how far we fall short of His ideal and our ideal ; a 
leader who understands our successes and our failures ; a 
leader who is never discouraged or disheartened because 
of them, who never gives us up when we give ourselves up ; 
a leader who still companions us and loves us, and is in the 
midst of us and who still leads us. The story of His life is 
the story, first of all, of a man ; a man who shows how a 
man can love and serve, and how a man can die ; and we 
hear Him in His love and in His service and in His death, 
saying : ^' Follow thou me ! " and we believe there is no 
life He has enriched we cannot enrich, no achievement He 
has accomplished we cannot accomplish, nothing which He 
has been we cannot be. He who healed the sick, He who 
preached the gospel. He who fed the hungry. He it is who 
said to us : *' Greater works than these that I have done 
shall ye do," and we follow Him, inspired by our loyalty 
and our love for and our trust in such a Leader as the 
world has never seen save in Him alone. 

With a common creed and a common hope and a com- 
mon purpose and a common Leader we have a common 
symbol. We express our loyalty to this Leader of ours by 
taking the sign of His disgrace to be the sign of our glory. 
The gallows on which He hung is our ornament. It shines 
from the steeples of our churches ; it flashes in jeweled 
form from the breasts of our Christian women ; the Cross 
is our honor. It stands for self-sacrifice, it symbolizes the 
highest phase of the highest life, for the highest life is love 
7 



98 THE CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD. 

and the highest phase of love is self-sacrifice for love's sake, 
and where that symbol leads we mean to follow, where sac- 
rifice summons we mean to go. And we are united in 
another symbol. Our Leader sat with His twelve at a 
table and bound them by a great oath in that hour of fel- 
lowship to be His followers, and we, too, gather at the table 
in a sacrament and oath of fellowship and of loyalty to 
Him. We have a common creed, a common hope, a com- 
mon purpose, a common Leader, and a common symbol. 

We look back upon the past and are encouraged by what 
has already been accomplished. It is true the church is 
not what it ought to be, it is true that it has not achieved 
what it ought to achieve, and yet, tracing its history from 
beginning to end right through those eighteen centuries, it 
is on the whole a path of widening and glowing light. 
Where this Christ has gone, where this Christ has led, 
where this fellowship has lived, where these men bound to 
Him and following Him have done their work, there war 
has been ameliorated (though not yet abolished), there 
labor has been emancipated from slavery (though not yet 
adequately rewarded), there commerce has turned from vio- 
lence and strife to at least honorable competition, there 
marriage has been transformed from a mere mercantile 
partnership into a sacred if not absolutely indissoluble bond, 
there woman has been lifted from the serf to her place of 
honor and of position, there education has been made com- 
mon, there the home has been cemented and made sacred, 
there life has been enriched and enlarged. 

As we look about us, and see that martyrdom is not 
ended and service is not ended and loyalty is not ended, 
we rejoice and glory in the work which this fellowship is 
doing to-day. Are there hungry men, it is by this fellow- 
ship charity comes. Are there sick, it is by this fellowship 
the hospitals are builded. Are there insane, it is this fel^ 



THE CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD. 99 

lowship which has taught men that insanity is no crime, 
rather a weakness. It is this fellowship that has taught that 
even crime is a disease, and that the criminal is to be 
pitied, while he is punished. In many a distant village, on 
many a remote prairie, in burning sands, in foreign lands, 
are men inspired by this hope, bound to us by this creed, 
animated by this purpose, following this Leader, who are 
attempting to bring about this kingdom of God on the 
earth; men who might achieve great results (humanly 
speaking) by their professions, giving themselves to an un- 
rewarded ministry, which is yet the highest and best of all 
rewards; men and women in this city of Brooklyn who 
might take their Sabbath afternoons for rest (and need the 
rest quite as much as any others), who are giving them- 
selves to an unrewarded service in the Sunday-schools, a 
service yet rewarded, indeed, by the work itself and the 
thankful hearts that gather about them. 

Last week I went down to Maine to attend the installa- 
tion of a young man over a little band that belongs to this 
great world-filling fellowship. One minister, rising before 
daybreak, plowed his way through four feet of snow for 
a mile and a haK in order that he might reach the train 
and come to this council. Another walked five miles along 
the snowy railroad track; another ten. And our party 
thought that if the man who had charge of the railroad had 
been as efficient and vigorous as the ministers we should 
not have been stalled for twenty-nine hours on the way. 
One of them spoke with such power and force as bore wit- 
ness that he would have won no mean success at the bar. 
Another, as justice of the peace, enforcer of law, settler of 
quarrels and contentions among laboring men in his own 
little manufacturing parish, had proved that he had abili- 
ties which make a man eminent in politics. A third had 
so organized the little band of fellows that were about him 



lOO THE CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD. 

in Christian work in that small unknown parish has proved 
himself a man of no mean abilities in executive and admin- 
istrative functions. And a fourth certainly showed qual- 
ities which might have w^on position if not eminence in 
music or art or literature. And these were but examples ; 
they are counted by the scores and by the hundreds ; men 
who are laying aside the paths that lead to fame, eminence 
and wealth that they may serve the good God. I came back 
proud, prouder than ever, that I am a Christian minister 
and counted worthy to be fellow with such men as are 
carrying on humble work in humble parishes, unknown, 
unsung, before God not unhonored. 

Some of you are members of this great Christian fellow- 
ship that began with twelve and now numbers millions; 
this fellowship that in the beginning had not so much as 
two changes of raiment, but now has the finest and noblest 
edifices in the world reared to the worship of God and the 
service of Christ. Ah ! my friends, I think it is a splendid 
thing to bean American — I am proud of that; and in 
some sense I think it is a greater thing to be an Anglo- 
Saxon — I am proud to belong to that race which dominates 
the world, whose branches stand together shoulder to 
shoulder, hand to hand, promoting intelligence, liberty, 
culture and civilization. But far grander than to be an 
American, far grander than to be an Anglo-Saxon, is it to 
be a Christian. The word was coined in derision, and the 
men that started out to redeem the world were called in 
scorn Messianists, Christians. We have taken the word and 
redeemed it, and to-day to be a follower of that Christ, to- 
day to belong to those who have abolished slavery, amelio- 
rated war, fed the hungry, turned the thought of men re- 
specting insanity from thinking it a crime to thinking it a 
form of disease, who have transformed their thought of 
crime itself — to be a world redeemer, to belong to this 



THE CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD. lOl 

fellowship, is a splendid thing. You and I are not worthy 
to belong to it. We do not do enough ; our ideals are 
not high enough ; our hopes are not radiant enough ; our 
purposes are not strong enough; our life is not noble 
enough; our service is not good enough. But we be- 
long to it. And if there are any of you here to-day 
who believe with us that God is good and is in His world 
making it better, if with us you have hope of a final 
victory, if with us you love and would be loyal to our 
Leader, if with us you wish to share in the glory of the 
Cross that was once a shame, if with us you wish to have 
some part in the great brotherhood of the common lot, our 
doors are open and we will welcome you. If not— well, we 
are sorry for those who might have such a creed, such a 
hope, such a purpose, such a Leader, such a symbol, and 
might have such a share in such a glory hereafter, and 
stand without. 



TO LIVE IS CHRIST. 

** For me to live is Christy a7zd to die is ^ain,^'* 

{Philippians^ i. 21.) 

A FRIEND told me the other day that an artist, of whom 
he asked : If you could get a day off from work what would 
you do with it? replied : I would go over to my studio and 
paint a picture. For that man to live was his art. He 
could think of no recreation, no enjoyment, better than that 
to which his life was devoted, and in which his life was 
spent. If I could go about in this congregation and ask one 
and another of you. What is your life? I wonder what 
answers I should get. A good many would ask at first : 
What do you mean ? but if I could press the question, if I 
could carry the inquisition on, if I could make you ask your- 
selves the question, I think your answers would be some- 
thing such as these : One mother would say to me : " My 
life is in my home, in my husband, in my children, in my 
home-keeping ; I am interested in the question of war or 
peace ; I am interested in questions of politics and of busi- 
ness, because my sons and my husband are interested in 
them ; I am interested in receptions of the opera or- the 
theater, or society in its various phases, because my daughters 
are interested in them. But if they did not care for them I 
should not. My life is in my home, in my husband, and in 
my children.'' And another would say : " My life is in my 
business. I am fond of my wife, I am fond of my children, 

102 



TO LIVE IS CHRIST. I03 

I am glad that I can go home when I must leave my store, 
and that I do not have to go to a club or a reading-room. But 
really my life is in my business. There is nothing I enjoy so 
much as the labor and the excitement of the street or of the 
counting-room." And another would say : '^ My life is in 
public life ; I enjoy it. Once in a while I do get tired and 
like to take a little rest, but I am soon tired of the rest and 
ready to go back again. I am so used to the glare of the 
footlights, so used to the blare of the trumpets, that I can- 
not live without them. My life is in public life." And 
another would say : " My life is in books. I do business ; 
I have to ; I have to get bread and butter for myseK and 
my family ; but really if you ask me what my life is, my an- 
swer would be that my life is in my books ; if I could only 
have all the books I want, if I could only have all the time 
I want to study the books, then I should be perfectly 
happy." And so as I should go about in this congregation, 
different men and different women would give me different 
answers to the question : What is your life ? The inspira- 
tion of one would be in the home, of another would be in 
business, of another in art, of another in literature, and of 
another in public excitement. 

Now, Paul says : " My life is Christ." The inspiration 
of my life comes from Christ. The object of my life is 
Christ. The end of my life is to accompHsh Christ's work 
in the world. Take Christ away, and you take everything 
away. You may take my friends, and still I shall find some- 
thing. You may take my earthly possessions, and you will 
not impoverish me. You may put me into trouble, and I 
will glory in tribulation. You may take away my theology 
— or change it — and still I will not despair. But if you 
were to take Christ away, you would take the keystone out 
of the arch and the arch would come tumbling to the ground. 
" For me to live is Christ." It is not even as loni^ as that 



104 TO LIVE IS CHRIST. 

in the original. You will see the word is is put in by the 
translator. '' For me to live Christ." I want, then, to try 
to illustrate a little what this means. Life is Christ, Christ 
is life. Not that I think this is quite true of any of us. 
Perhaps it is not absolutely true even of Paul. But it was 
his ideal, and it is in some lesser measure our ideal, and I 
want to try to set before you what it seems to me this means 
— to live is Christ. 

In the first place, our creed is Christ. Do you ask me 
what we Christians believe, what we in Plymouth Church 
believe, what I personally believe, my answer is Christ. 
What else ? Nothing. The whole of my creed is summed 
up in Christ. What is your philosophy? Well, I have my 
philosophy, but that is not essential. I have my theory 
about the Bible, quite a different theory from the one I had 
twenty years ago. I have my theory of Atonement : it is 
quite a different one from that I held a quarter century 
ago. I have my theory of the future state ; that is very 
different from what it was twenty-five years ago. I have 
my theory of what is the Divine nature, and that has changed 
a great deal in twenty-five years. My creed is not in my 
conception of Atonement or of revelation or of the future 
life ; my creed is Christ, and that has not changed, except 
to grow deeper, stronger and clearer. For me to believe 
is Christ. 

If you want to know what Paul meant by this, turn to 
his Epistles and run through them. He writes to the Thes- 
salonians about the future, and all he has to say is this : 
Christ is coming. He has to write to the Corinthians how 
they are to meet worldliness and corruption, and all he has to 
say to them is, " Christ crucified '' — self-sacrifice. " Mani- 
fested" — revealed in Christ. He writes to the Galatians, 
and what he says to them is : " Stand fast in the liberty where- 
with Christ has made you free." He writes to the Ephe- 



TO LIVE IS CHRIST. IC5 

sians and Colossians, to whom the mystical philosophy has 
come from Alexander, and he says to them : Principal- 
ities and powers, and eons — I do not care whether they 
are or not, Christ controls them ; Christ rules them ; they 
all belong to Christ. He has to write to the Philippians to 
acknowledge a missionary box and His message to them 
is:/* My Christ shall supply all your needs.'* Whatever 
He writes, the end of His letter is always the same — 
Christ. Everything comes from Christ; centers about 
Christ; ends in Christ. So in the Christian church, the 
creed is Christ. The Presbyterians had a good deal to 
say in their Westminster Confession of Faith, and the Ro- 
man Cathohcs in their Pius IX. creed, and the Episco- 
palians in their Thirty-nine Articles, and the Congrega- 
tionalists in their unwritten creed, but at the heart of all of 
them is this : Faith in Christ. For to believe is Christ. 
What do we mean by the Trinity ? We mean that all the 
dim and vague revelations of God in nature and in human 
history are focused in Christ ; that all the mystic revela- 
tions of God in human experience are interpreted in 
Christ. We believe in the Atonement. What do we 
mean? That God and man were at one in Christ, and as 
they were at one in Christ, so when Christ's work is done 
in the world they will be at one in humanity. We believe 
in Regeneration. What do we mean? That no man is 
really born, no man really becomes a man, no man is 
really cradled and enters into the beginning of life, until 
Christ is born in him. We believe in Revelation. What 
do we mean ? We mean that there has been a real reve- 
lation, a real unveiUng, a real disclosure in the man Christ 
Jesus. All the articles of our creed, start, call them what 
you will. Revelation, Regeneration, Atonement, Redemp- 
tion, future life, all end in Christ. All articles of our faith 
lead to Christ. 



I06 TO LIVE IS CHRIST. 

For us to worship is Christ. That which distinguishes 
Christian worship from Pagan worship is just this : that the 
Christian worship centers about Christ. There are tem- 
ples ; they sometimes look much alike. There are altars ; 
they sometimes resemble one another. There are forms 
and services in some Christian churches that are very like 
other forms and services in Pagan churches. There is a 
worship of God in the Pagan church as in the Christian 
church. The difference between the two is this : that all 
our worship centers in Christ. When we come to church 
to confess our sins, what most deeply impresses us in the 
sinfulness is not the harm we have done ourselves, it is 
not the harm we have done our neighbor, it is the hurt we 
have inflicted on God as manifested in Jesus Christ His 
Son. It is no mere figure we say we helped to plait the 
crown of thorns and helped to thrust the spear into His 
side. We believe in ver}^ truth the long night of Christ's 
suffering was brought about by the sins of the whole w^orld 
and we have contributed to them. 

Our confession and our repentance are rooted in Christ ; 
our thanksgiving culminates in Him. We come here to 
sing our praise to our God j and we thank Him for life, 
for health, for friends and home and children ; we thank 
Him for a free country and an unspotted name ; we thank 
Him for education ; but more than for these, more than 
for any one of them, more than for all of them combined, 
we thank Him for this : That He has come into the world 
in the person of His Son ; that He has revealed Himself to 
us ; that He has made clear His nature ; that He has made 
it possible for us to come to Him ; that He is at one with 
us and we are at one with Him in Christ. 

Is it right to sing praises to Christ ; to pray to Christ ; 
to confess to Christ ; to worship Christ ? I will answer as 
I once heard Mr. Beecher answer : ^^ I am not afraid to 



TO LIVE IS CHRIST. 107 

offer on earth the worship which the angels and the saints 
offer in Heaven.'' 

" And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels 
round about the throne, and the beasts, and the elders ; 
and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thou- 
sand, and thousands of thousands; saying with a loud 
voice : Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, 
and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honor, and 
glory, and blessing. And every creature which is in Heaven 
and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in 
the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying ; Blessing, 
and honor, and glory, and power, be unto Him that sitteth 
upon the throne, and unto the Lamb, for ever and ever." 

I am not afraid to stand in the outer circle and lift up 
my voice with their voices. I am not afraid to say " Bless- 
ing, and honor, and glory, and power, be unto the Lamb 
that was slain." I am not afraid to offer all the reverence 
I have (I wish it were more), all the love my heart can con- 
tain (I wish it were greater), all the life I have (I wish it 
were a richer one) to the Christ who died upon the cross. 
He is the object and the center of our worship. 

The other day I heard a minister say something like 
this : We worship God the Father, we have access to Him 
through Jesus Christ the Son, we are inspired to worship 
l3y the Holy Spirit. Let those get help from such distinc- 
tions who can ; they are no help to me. I do not think of 
the Father as sitting on the throne, and the Prince as wait- 
ing in the ante-room to take me to the Father, and the 
Holy Spirit, the messenger from the Prince, coming to tell 
me to enter and make the acquaintance of the Prince. 
There is but one God, and that one God is revealed in Jesus 
Christ our Lord, and all that I have to offer to the Eternal 
and the Infinite, and the other\vise unknown Father, I 
offer — would God it were more — to Christ. 



I08 TO LIVE IS CHRIST. 

To believe is Christ, to worship is Christ, to Hve the 
ordinary, practical, commonplace daily life is Christ. Edu- 
cation is Christ. Education cannot be made Christian by 
having morning prayers in the school or a catechism in 
the afternoon. It is not to be made Christian by having a 
little fringe of religion sewed on the edge of the garment 
to be ripped off as soon as one gets out of school. Edu- 
cation is Christ, because the whole end and object of edu- 
cation is to develop character, and the consummate char- 
acter is Christ. We study theoretic science in order that 
we may understand the world which Christ has made, and 
practical science that we may know how to use the tools 
which Christ has put into our hands ; and history, that we 
may understand the growth of the kingdom which Christ 
has come to bring about in the world ; and literature, that 
we may comprehend the deepest emotions and the highest 
and divinest life of men, the life brooded by Christ, " the 
light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world." 
All education is for Christ in the heart and thought of him 
who says that to live is Christ. 

All industry is Christ. The manufacturer and the farmer 
are creators, and could not do their work did not Christ's 
sun shine and Christ's rain fall and Christ work with them. 
The merchant is a distributor. He could not distribute 
had not Christ made open the avenue through which the 
distribution should be carried on. The lawyer is adminis- 
tering justice. He could not administer justice if Christ 
did not brood a sentiment of justice in the hearts of men 
that is stronger than self-interest or pride or passion or any 
other human power. Politics is Christ. In the heart and 
thought of him who beheves that to live is Christ, politics 
is Christ, and all questions have, in their last analysis, their 
relation to the kingdom which Christ came to bring upon 
the earth. Not how shall we build up the Republican 



TO LIVE IS CHRIST. IO9 

party, not how shall we build up the Democratic party 
or the Prohibition party or the Populist party, not even, 
not chiefly, how shall we build up our own country, but 
this : how shall we so vote and speak and act and write as 
to bring on in the world and in the whole world, first of all 
in our own country, our own state, our own city — for re- 
ligion, like charity, begins at home — but eventually in the 
whole round globe — the kingdom of righteousness and 
justice and peace and love and mercy, the kingdom that 
Christ has come from Heaven to inaugurate on the earth. 
Shall we have peace — shall we have war? We must go 
with that question as Christian men to Christ. I know it 
will seem to some of you as though I were talking cant. I 
cannot help it if falsity has taken sacred words and made 
them false by using them in falsehood ; I will not throw the 
coin away. Shall we have war — shall we have peace? I 
answer, we must go to Christ and ask the question. What 
do we owe to an oppressed people ? What opportunity 
have we to give them succor ? Let us enter on this war for 
revenge for the injury done to two hundred and fifty 
Americans, it will be an unrighteous war. Let us enter on 
this war to grasp a territory that belongs to another power, 
and add to our own, it will be an unrighteous war. Let us 
enter upon this war for the glory that comes from ourselves 
stronger than the fourth-rate power of Spain, it will be an 
unrighteous war. But if we are forced and driven into it 
in order that we may set a people free for their own Chris- 
tian development, then, and then only, may it be a Chris- 
tian war. At all events, all politics, all dignity, all educa- 
tion, — all life, has its birth in Christ, its brooding in Christ, 
its culmination in Christ. To live is Christ. 

And so, this Palm Sunday morning that celebrates the 
time when Christ came in prophetic procession, declaring 
that in some future time, how far away no one knows, He 



no TO LIVE IS CHRIST. 

will come again to the world, not with weeping, but only 
with gladness and rejoicing, I ask you to swell His proces- 
sion, not by song only, not by creed only, not by prayer 
only, but by living Christ. Christ does not ask the la^^7er 
to leave his office, or the merchant his shop, or the car- 
penter his bench, or the politician his senate chamber, or 
the soldier his ranks, any more than he asks the preacher 
to leave his pulpit. He summons you, not to preach, not 
to talk, not to sing, save as these are the expressions of life ; 
He summons you to live Christ. Then, having, indeed, 
lived Christ, and drawn near that door the curtain of which 
is black on this side and golden with glory on the other, 
you will say to die is gain — because to die is still to live, 
and live a Christly life more simply, more easily, more 
royally, more di\^nely ; nay, a life from which the unChristly 
elements will have been taken from your heart. 

Help us to believe in Thee ; to love Thee ; to follow 
Thee ; to live Thee ; so, w^hen death shall come, to die in 
Thee. For Thine own namesake, O Christ 1 Amen. 



THE NEW VERSUS THE OLD THEOLOGY. 

« * * * that God may be all in alV 

(/. Corinthians, xv* 28.) 

In these words Paul sums up the end of creation and re- 
demption. At last, when God's work is all done, this will 
be the consummation — God will be seen to be all and in all. 

We are all conscious that the church is passing through a 
theological change. Some of us are glad of it ; some of us 
are sorry. To some of us it appears to be a change away 
from religion ; to others a change toward a deeper spirit of 
religion. To me the latter appears to be the truth. This 
church's kindly recognition of the fact that I have now been 
ten years your pastor has itself led me to review those ten 
years a little, and more the years that preceded. I can say 
for myself, that in the now nearly forty years during which 
I have been in the Christian ministry, my theological con- 
ceptions have undergone a very radical change, and one, I 
think, common to a great many people. I propose this 
morning, as far as I can within the reasonable limits of a 
discourse, to interpret the change which has taken place 
during the last thirty or forty years in the history of the 
church by an interpretation of the change which has taken 
place in my own thought and my own feeling. Whether I 
shall be interpreting rightly the thought and feeUng of others, 
I cannot tell \ 1 shall try to interpret my own with candor. 

If I look back to the time when I first entered the minis- 

III 



112 THE NEW VERSUS THE OLD THEOLOGY. 

try, my conception of theology appears now to have been 
something Uke this : That there was a good God at the 
center of the universe ; that He dwelt there as upon a great 
white throne, surrounded by His angels, who were His 
messengers ; that from time to time He made worlds, and 
that once in some remote time He made this world — how 
long He was doing it I neither knew nor did I much care ; 
that He made the world as an engineer makes an engine, 
and regulated it as an engineer regulates an engine, who, 
having set the forces at work which are to move it, rules 
those forces by his hand upon the lever ; that as He had 
made the world of nature, so He made the world of men, 
and ruled them as a king rules his subjects, issuing his laws 
and requiring obedience to those laws under penalty (for 
penalty is necessary to law — without it law is mere counsel 
or advice) ; that men had violated this law and had de- 
served the penalty, and yet God was merciful ; He had, 
therefore, sent His Son into the world to bear the penalty, 
and God thus was freed, as it were, to set aside the law, or 
a least set aside the penalty, and let men go free. Some- 
thing like this was my theological conception. 

My experience was akin to this conception. I thought 
of God as one who had made the world ; I thought of God 
as one who, from time to time, had interfered with the 
world to regulate it ; I thought of God who could now, in 
answer to special prayer, interfere with special providences 
to render special favors ; I thought of God as one who, if I 
abandoned my sin, would let me off from the penalty of 
my sin, who, if I began to live a righteous life, would for- 
get and obliterate the past. My prayers were for special 
things I wanted ; my hope was for final deliverance, beyond 
the grave, from the penalties which I had justly incurred 
this side of the grave. Something like that, as I now look 
back upon it through the mist of years, was my thought 



THE NEW VERSUS THE OLD THEOLOGY. II3 

and my experience ; and something like that, I am sure, 
was the thought and experience of many, and is the thought 
and experience of many to-day. It is a mistake to think 
that the change which has come over the thoughts of some 
of us is a minor and unimportant change, and it is a still 
greater mistake for us who stand on the vantage ground of 
what we think a higher experience and a better conception 
to attack the faith which we believe we have outgrown. I 
respect it ; I respect the men who hold it ; but I myself hold 
it no longer. 

I used to think that the radical difference in theology 
was between those who believed in the supernatural and 
those who disbelieved in it ; for so long as I thought of God 
as sitting apart from nature, if I disbelieve in the supernat- 
ural I either disbelieve in God, or else I believed Him to be 
an absentee God, who had nothing to do with nature. If I 
thought He had made an engine and put it in motion and 
did not stand near with His hand on the lever, regulating 
the engine, then to me the world was a runaway locomo- 
tive ; I did not know what would become of it. But I 
think no longer of God as apart from nature or apart from 
life ; He is Himself the indwelling force and activity. There 
are no forces ; there is only one force — God. There are no 
laws : there is only one law — the will of God. There are 
no vital energies; there is only one Infinite and Eternal 
Energy from which all things proceed. There is no Great 
First Cause, father of a great variety of little and secondary 
causes; because there is one great underlying cause, a 
causa causans of everything in life. Therefore, I no longer 
recognize a radical distinction between the natural and the 
supernatural. All the natural is most supernatural, and all 
the supernatural most natural ; for God is not apart from 
nature, ruling it, but in nature Himself — the vital force, the 
only power. 
8 



114 THE NEW VERSUS THE OLD THEOLOGY. 

So I have come to think of creation, not as something 
which God did once, in six days or six thousand years or 
six myriads of years, but as a continuous process, and God 
Himself in the process. All days are creative days ; all en- 
ergies are creative energies. Every spring is a new crea- 
tion. Every year, every hour He divides the waters under 
the firmament from the waters above the firmament, and 
lifts the waters from the ocean and causes them to float in 
clouds above. Every spring He bids the earth bring forth its 
wealth and flower and blossom. Not a flower that bloomed 
in Eden was more truly new-created by the fiat of Jehovah 
than those flowers that stand here on the pulpit to-day. 
He is in all the processes of nature. If your soul leaves 
your body, your body crumbles to the dust and mixes in the 
common earth. If you could conceive the spirit of Al- 
mighty God withdrawing from all the natural operations of 
the universe, the universe would crumble to the dust and 
cease to be. No bird would longer sing ; no flowers again 
would bloom ; no fishes would swim in the sea ; no ocean 
tides would sweep into the harbors or the bays ; no sun would 
put forth its rays ; no living man would beat with pulse of 
hope, or fear, or love. God is the spirit of the universe ; 
imagine that spirit gone, and the universe would be dust 
and ashes. 

So, as I think of God universally, continually, day by 
day, hour by hour, creating, so I think of Him not ruling 
over the creation which He has made, but ruling in it, as 
ray spirit rules in my body ; omnipresent in the universe, 
as my spirit is omnipresent in my body. Men sometimes 
tell me this is pantheism ; but it is not pantheism. The 
difference between saying God is the all and saying that 
God is in all is surely clear enough for every one to com- 
prehend. 

I no longer, therefore, believe in special providences, or. 



THE NEW VERSUS THE OLD THEOLOGY. II5 

rather, I believe that all providences are special provi- 
dences. There is no difference between the general provi- 
dence and the special providence, except this, that the 
special providence is a general providence specially per- 
ceived. There are some providences which men see more 
readily than others, but God is the universal provider. 
Therefore, it is that Christ says : Not a sparrow falls to the 
ground but your Heavenly Father knoweth it. When the 
earthquake rives the earth and scores and hundreds and 
thousands are struck down into death, when the great tor- 
nado sweeps out of the howling west and carries myriads 
to destruction, then we think the Almighty is abroad on 
the earth ; but ^^ not a sparrow falls to the ground but your 
Heavenly Father knoweth it." Day by day we are to ask 
for our daily bread — for this is His provision — as well as 
the large things. The children in the household hardly 
know that it is father who has provided bread and meat 
and milk for their daily breakfast, but when at Christmas 
he brings home a box of luscious candy, they gather 
around and say : Father has brought us something. We 
are, after all, but children of an older growth, and forget 
that all the guidance and all the counsel and all the minis- 
try is God's, and only think that now and then He coun- 
sels, and now and then He guides, and now and then He 
feeds, but all providences are special, all providences gen- 
eral. 

So I no longer look back for the evidence that God was 
in history — though I believe that He was in history — but 
I look about me to see Him in history now. Not that He 
was in history in Palestine, and not in Europe ; not that 
He was in the history of Israel, and not in that of Greece 
or Rome or medieval Europe — always in history. Not 
more truly guiding Moses in the fifty years of his states- 
manship than guiding that other great statesman who has 



Il6 THE NEW VERSUS THE OLD THEOLOGY. 

just passed from honor on earth to glory m heaven — Glad- 
stone — m his three score years of statesmanship ; not more 
truly the emancipator of the Hebrew race when He led 
them through the Red Sea than the emancipator of our 
own negro race when He led them through the red sea of 
blood in our time. The difference between the Bible and 
other histories is not that God was in one age and not in 
another age, but that there were men who could see Him 
then, and men seem to be blind now. If this old record 
had told the story of a battle between the ships (had they 
had ships) of Israel and of a Pagan nation, and in that 
battle every ship of the Pagans was sunk and not a man of 
Israel was killed, not a skeptic on the globe but would have 
pointed the finger of scorn at the story and laughed at the 
men who had faith in it ; but to-day we read without a ques- 
tion that story of an American victory. 

What is a miracle ? Do I not believe in miracles ? I 
believe they are going on all the time ! What I object to 
is the narrowness which shuts miracles up between the cov- 
ers of a Bible and puts them over into one principal epoch 
and one special time. What is a miracle ? Not the mani- 
festation of an extraordinary power — but an extraordinary 
manifestation of an ordinary power. The extraordinary 
manifestations of the ordinary power are going on all the 
time. Somebody will tell you to-morrow that this is new 
theology and heretical. This particular part is as old as 
Augustine and as sound, for it is Augustine who says that 
a birth is a greater miracle than a resurrection, because it 
is more astounding that what never was should begin to be 
than that which was once should seem to cease and yet 
continue. Why, says Renan, is not resurrection repeated ? 
It is. Every death is a resurrection. Why is it not seen? 
Ah, if we could see the resurrections as clearly as we see the 
births, they would cease to be miracles. What makes a 



THE NEW VERSUS THE OLD THEOLOGY. II7 

miracle a miracle is that it is an unusual manifestation of 
an ordinary power. The world is full of the witnesses of 
God's presence, and we do not see them. 

So I am coming to think of revelation, or, rather, I have 
come to think of revelation- — as a progressive and ever con- 
tinuous process — God showing Himself to man. I like, 
sometimes, when I am preaching such a sermon as this, to 
show you that other men are more radical than I am, so I 
read from the pages of Clark's " Outlines of Christian The- 
ology,*' whose author is a professor of theology at Colgate 
University, this definition : 

^^ Revelation was by necessity progressive, as all educa- 
tional processes must be. Men had first to be taught al- 
most as children, who must have training adapted to their 
state. God brought in a higher truth as rapidly as man 
could learn to act upon it ; in fact He was always in ad- 
vance of man, and chargeable rather with haste than with 
needless delay.*' 

This is what we are coming to believe of revelation : God 
is disclosing Himself to men only so fast as they are able 
to receive the disclosure; the disclosure, therefore, is 
clearer in the New Testament than in the Old ; clearer in 
the Prophets than in the Law ; clearer in some books of the 
Bible than in other books of the Bible. 

But some one says : Why not a new revelation ? Why 
not a revelation to-day? As well ask why not a new Co- 
lumbus to discover a new continent ? Because all the con- 
tinents have been discovered. So the Bible contains such a 
record of the disclosure of God in human experience ; that 
no continent of truth is left undiscovered. Herbert Spen- 
cer says there is an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from 
which all things proceed, and Matthew Arnold says there 
is a Power not ourselves that makes for righteousness. We 



Il8 THE NEW VERSUS THE OLD THEOLOGY. 

turn to the Bible for the answer to our question : What is 
this Energy? What is the nature of this Power? This is 
what the prophets tell us, with various degrees of clearness, 
with successive and progressive declaration : First, God is 
love. Second, love as manifested in the life of Christ serv- 
ice. Third, service unto the bounds of seK-sacrifice. 
Fourth, self-sacrifice disclosed by laying down one's life 
that another who is unworthy of it may enter into life. 
That is the kind of energy from which all things proceed ; 
that is the kind of power that makes for righteousness. 
Love — love that serves, love that sacrifices itself, love that 
so sacrifices itself that it lays down life in order that the 
recipient of it may enter into life. Now what is there more 
to say? What is there conceivable beyond this? The con- 
tinent is there ; the continual revelation is in the discovery 
of what this continent contains and what these truths mean. 
And that is continual. There are men and women in this 
congregation who can look back and remember the time 
when they said, with tripping tongue : ^^ God is love," and 
scarce knew what it meant ; but now after the years of ex- 
perience, of comfort in sorrow, of counsel in perplexity, of 
deliverence in temptation, of recovery from sin — now they 
can scarce repeat the words ^^God is love'* without the 
tears coming to their eyes, for love means more and God 
means more, and there has been in them a revealing and 
unveiling, a discovery of God. 

I think of God no longer as apart from men, ruling over 
them, but dwelling in men and ruling them from within. I 
care less for laws and more for influence, think of law less 
as a divine statute and more as a divine love. Law seems 
to me less an edict which God has issued, and more the 
very nature of God Himself flowing out into all the race of 
men, as the sunshine flows from the sun. What father 
would be content to rule his children by law and penalty? 



THE NEW VERSUS THE OLD THEOLOGY. II9 

In the olden time the teacher ruled them by rod. What 
teacher would be content to do that to-day? The teacher 
to-day lives in the hearts of her pupils, and holds them by 
influences from within, not by force from without. The 
pastor lives in the heart of his people and holds them by in- 
fluences from within, not by penances attached to wrong- 
doing from without. God rules the human race by influ- 
ences from within, not by edict and rod from without. God 
is in humanity as God is in nature. If you ask me what I 
mean by that, I answer : In humanity as the husband is in 
the wife and the wife in the husband ; as the child is in the 
father and the father in the child ; as the pastor is in the 
heart of his people and the people are in the heart of the 
pastor. As man is in his fellow-man, so or only so can I 
understand it — is God in men, and the laws are His own 
being working out beneficent results. 

So forgiveness is no more the remission of penalty, it is 
the taking away of sin. " Behold the Lamb of God that 
taketh away the sin of the world." I think I used to read 
it thus : '' Behold the Lamb of God that takes away some 
sins from some men." No longer do I think of forgiveness 
as beginning at Bethlehem. God has been always in human 
history ; lifting off sin from men, cleansing men, purifying 
men, redeeming men, emancipating men, setting men free ; 
and Christ is the condition of salvation, because Christ is 
God come into humanity, and there is no deliverance from 
sin and there is no life except as God comes into the hearts 
of men. 

And so I no longer regard incarnation as an episode 
standing by itself. From the earliest ages God has been 
coming into men ; He has been dwelling in men ; He has 
been brooding divine experience in men ; He has been 
teaching them love and faith and hope, and they have im- 
parted their faith and their love and their hope to others. 



120 THE NEW VERSUS THE OLD THEOLOGY. 

And so, little by little, through fragmentary representations, 
God has been making Himself known, in all ages and in all 
races, but most of all in the Hebrew race, and most of all 
in the prophets of the Hebrew race ; but by various voices — 
imperfect voices ; by various lives — imperfect lives. At last 
the fulness of time came ; He came into the one incom- 
parable life ; He filled it as He had filled other lives ; but 
this life He filled full to overflowing ; in this life there was 
no subtraction ; in this glass there was no blur ; in this por- 
trait there was no lineament lacking, no lineament inade- 
quately drawn. God was in Christ redeeming the world 
unto Himself ; and He was in Christ that He might be in 
Christ's followers; that He might come into me; that He 
might come into you ; that He might inspire us with the 
strength with which He inspired Jesus; that He might 
lead us to live the life that Jesus lived ; that He might 
give us a like courage; that He might cleanse us that 
we should be clean like Him; that He might draw us 
with the like hope ; that He might make us one of the 
great band of brothers of whom Christ was first-born; 
that He might inspire us to offer that prayer which we 
have read this morning ; that we might ourselves be filled 
with all the fulness of God. 

So I no longer look forward to a great day of resurrec- 
tion. A seed is planted in the ground ; when does the res- 
urrection of the seed take place? It breaks its shell; it 
pushes itself up through the dark loam ; it steers its way 
strangely toward the light, though it is not in the light ; at 
last it breaks through the earth, and the two little leaves 
appear above the surface of the ground — when did the res- 
urrection take place? Did it take place when the integu- 
ment broke ? Did it take place when the first shoot began 
to push itself to the light or the first root began to push 
itself down into the earth ? At what point did it take place 



THE NEW VERSUS THE OLD THEOLOGY. 121 

in the upward journey? Or did it not take place until the 
earth was left behind and it emerged into the sunlight? 
We are all in process of resurrection. Just in the measure 
that we have within us what the apostle calls " the power of 
an endless life/' just in that measure we are beginning to 
break the integument and push our way toward the sun. 
All science tells us that death is not an instantaneous proc- 
ess. The moment a man is born he begins to die; the 
physical body begins to decay, and new physical elements 
take the place of the old ones, and that process goes on 
day after day and year after year. Death goes on from the 
cradle to the grave ; and resurrection goes along with it ; 
the growing spirit becoming more and more immortal, 
more and more unable to keep within the flesh, more and 
more piercing the integument, until at last it breaks the 
shell and casts away and takes its wings and flies heaven- 
ward. If we are caterpillars, we are caterpillars with wings, 
and they are growing. 

So as I look back along the years, I can see that my 
theology and my experience have changed. All the natural 
seems to me now most supernatural ; creation a continuous 
process ; special providence in every act of life ; history as 
full of the presence of God now as it ever was ; revelation, 
the discovery of God, still carried on as it was carried on 
in the ages past ; law, God's own nature pushing itself out 
and working itself through the natures of His children; 
forgiveness, the continual process of cleansing and setting 
free from sin ; incarnation, the entrance through the open 
door of Christ into humanity, carried on and on, not to be 
completed until the whole human race is one with God ; 
prayer, not a seeking that God shall do what I want, but a 
seeking that I may do what God wants, the conformity of 
my nature to God's nature ; faith, not a belief that other 
men have seen God and testified to Him truly, but a per- 



122 THE NEW VERSUS THE OLD THEOLOGY. 

ception myself of God in human life and in human expe- 
rience ; and religion, not a something apart from life to be 
found in churches and taken at last as a kind of torch 
through the dark door of death, but the life of God in the 
soul of man. 



THE USE AND ABUSE OF GOD'S GIFTS. 

** In the world ye shall have tribulation^ but be of good cheer ; I have 
overcome the world " 

(John, xvi, 2Z') 

This text is the climax of what I wish to say to you this 
morning concerning the relation which the Christian as a 
child of God bears to the world in which he lives. I do 
not expect to cover the whole ground of that relationship, of 
course ; but only to point out some of the thoughts which 
the Bible contains and some of the principles which it 
illustrates. 

By the world we mean two things, which are in essence, 
perhaps, akin. We mean, in the first place, the material 
world which is our dwelling-place — the things, the material 
things by which we are surrounded ; and we mean, in the 
second place, the world of men — human society, but this 
world of men in its temporal and sensuous aspect, the world 
of men as it lives in the world of matter ; not animal man 
only, but social man, the temporal man, the man of to-day. 
This word "world** is of German origin, and is composed 
of two words, meaning " man " — " age." To live in the 
world is to live in the generation of man to which you be- 
long, and thus this term world comes to have the double 
signification — the cosmos or ordered material world, and 
society or humankind in its present earthly aspects. 

Now, what is our relation to this world of men and this 

123 



124 THE USE AND ABUSE OF GODS GIFTS. 

world of matter? When I say our relation, I mean what is 
the relation of those of us who profess to be followers and 
disciples of Jesus Christ. How should we look at this world 
of matter and this world of men? How should we live in 
it ? What are our relations to it ? What is to be our 
point of view respecting it? 

In the first place, this world of matter is God's world. 
He made it ; and He made the whole of it. ^' In the be- 
ginning he created the heavens and the earth." The sea 
is His, and He made it ; the dry land. His hands fashioned 
it ; the cattle on a thousand hills are His ; the wild beasts, 
the Psalmist tells us are His ; the world is His and the ful- 
ness thereof. The Persians thought that there were t^vo 
gods — a good god w^ho made the good things in the world 
and a bad god who made the bad things in the world. 
Something of that notion has drifted down into our time, 
and I think there are persons who almost regard the world 
as a kind of double creation — part of it God-made and part 
of it Devil-made ; part of it for good and part of it for evil. 
But this is not the Hebrew point of view. This is not the 
New Testament point of view. The world is God's; the 
whole world is God's ; He made it ; He made the whole of it, 
and there is not one single solitary thing in the world that has 
not its legitimate and proper place in a well-ordered and 
beneficent creation. God made life and God made death. 
God made health and God made sickness. It is in this 
belief that the prophet speaks when he makes Jehovah say : 
'^ I, God, create good and evil." The whole world is God's 
world. There is no part of it we are to shut off and say 
that does not belong to Him, that came from some other 
quarter. 

As the whole world is God's w^orld, it is our world be- 
cause He made it, primarily and chiefly, as man's dwelling- 
place. In the very time when He made it He gave the 



THE USE AND ABUSE OF GOD S GIFTS. I25 

whole of it into man's hands and said : I have made this 
your home and your dwelHng-place, take it all ; take all its 
forces, all its juices, all its natural products, all its living 
creatures, have dominion over it, subdue it, control it, it is 
yours. And what God said in creation is repeated again 
and again in the New Testament. ^^ He givethus all things 
richly to enjoy," says Paul. " All things are yours, whether 
Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or life, or death, or things 
present, or things to come — all are yours, and ye are 
Christ's, and Christ is God's." The whole world is ours, 
because the whole world is our Father's : The whole of 
life is ours, because the whole of life belongs to our 
Father. 

The Greeks abounded in life. They were rich in all the 
resources of life. They took the whole of life, and they 
enjoyed it; its appetites, its passions, its pleasures, its 
beauty, its love, its vigor — it was all theirs ; and medieval 
Christianity, or at least a section of the medieval church, 
said this won't do. These pleasures are leading men into 
licentiousness and drunkenness and into all manner of ex- 
cesses ; these beauties are stimulating the evil passions of 
men, and are working harm ; this literature is immoral and 
working out immorality. We must cut off the art, we must 
cut off the literature, we must cut off the drama, because, 
these being dangerous, they are disastrous. The Greek be- 
lieved that all food belonged to man, and gave himself up, 
oftentimes, to weeks of feasting, and so the church cut the 
food off altogether and put fasting over against the pagan 
feasting. The Greek gave himself up to the care of the 
body. Nothing was too much to develop the fineness of 
physical condition, the most splendid athletic condition, the 
most beautiful female form ; and the church said : You 
are spending altogether too much time on the body, on that 
which passes away, therefore we won't spend any time in 



126 THE USE AND ABUSE OF GOD'S GIFTS. 

this way. The Greeks indulged in luxurious baths, and so 
the saints took no baths. The Greeks gave themselves to 
the adornment of the person, and there was one saint of 
the medieval age, I believe, who for twenty-five years did 
not comb her hair ; it was part of her piety. Because the 
Greeks had thrown themselves into life with abandon, there- 
fore the early Christians drew themselves out of life alto- 
gether, finding in place by their disregard of the body, by 
their exercise of fasting, by the abolishment of art, except 
as it has a distinctly religious and spiritual end in view, 
seeking the diminution of life. 

Now that is not the Christ spirit. It is not the New 
Testament spirit. It is not the Hebraic spirit. On the 
contrary, the message of the Bible to you and to me is 
this : God made the world and the whole of it ; and He 
made it for you, and gives you all things richly to enjoy ; 
all Hfe is yours, all material things are yours ; the whole 
world, all activity, belong to you, and you are to take them 
and to use them. Let me illustrate : It is said, and with 
truth, that alcohol has produced an incalculable amount of 
poverty and crime and wretchedness in the world ; and I 
suppose there are not a few people who really think, though 
they would not quite dare to say so, and certainly would not 
say so in the church, that God made a mistake in allowing 
alcohol to be in the world at all ; it never ought to have 
come here ; certainly that, they think, was made by the 
devil and not by God. Now, over against that, my affir- 
mation is that alcohol is one of God's gifts to man. It is 
part of His creation ; He made it, put it here, and what we 
have to do is to find out what its right use is. Is it a food, 
is it a beverage, then we are to use it in that way. Is it 
no food and no beverage, but simply a medicine, then we 
are to banish it to the drug store. Is it neither food nor 
medicine, ought it never to be brought in homes, but only 



THE USE AND ABUSE OF GOD'S GIFTS. 1 27 

to be used in the arts and sciences, then we are to abolish 
it from both drug store and home. I am not going to dis- 
cuss here which of these things we ought to do, but I do 
assert that the first thing to do respecting any material thing 
is to find out, scientifically, what is its use. The fact that 
it has been misused, and the attendant fact that the misuse 
has brought incalculable harm and injury into the world, is 
not a reason to believe that God did not make it ; it is a 
reason for the wisest, the most skilful, the most energetic, 
the most open-minded among us to begin the study of the 
problem what is its divine use. For there is nothing in the 
world that has not somewhere, in arts, in sciences, in med- 
icine, in food, a proper place in human life. 

Or, let me apply it to an activity. The first and most 
instinctive appreciation of any element in music is the time 
element. People who do not care for harmony, people 
who do not care for melody enjoy the time element, and 
when the rhythm of the music is sharply-marked they in- 
stinctively keep time to it, sometimes with the head, some- 
times with the hands, and occasionally with the feet. Now, 
that is the way in which marching and dancing have grown 
up. It is the most natural thing in the world for a little 
child to dance to music. Crossing on the ocean steamer 
last summer there was a little child three years old who sat 
at our table. We were on the North German Lloyd line, 
where there is music every day at dinner, and when a Strauss 
waltz was struck up the little child cared more for the music 
than for her dinner, and jumped down out of her mother's 
lap to the floor and swayed to and fro, keeping time with 
her head and with her body and with her feet to music. 
Keeping time to music is native to man. God made him 
to do it; it belongs to him. Now what are we to do? 
Why, I say we are to use that quality in man. It is a part 
of human nature, and there is no part of human nature that 



128 THE USE AND ABUSE OF G0D\S GIFTS. 

is intrinsically bad ; there is no part that may not be mis- 
used, and there is no part that may not be rightly used. 
If we put all dancing together and call it the dance and 
condemn it, putting our prohibition against the innocent 
dance of children on the lawn, then those who want to dance 
may put all dancing together and call it the dance and give 
their approbation to every form of dance. Indiscrimi- 
nate condemnation inevitably produces indiscriminate ap- 
proval. The one is the child of the other. The Christian 
is to learn how to discriminate between the right and the 
wrong use of faculties as between the right and the wrong 
use of material things. No Christian has a right to put the 
body above the soul. Christians have no right to go to 
dances that keep them up at such hours and in such atmos- 
pheres and under such conditions that the next day they 
are unfit for the service of humanity, the fulfilment of 
their right work in the world, the accomplishment of God's 
praise and glory. But the duty of the Christian is not to 
put all dancing in one room and turn the key on it. It is 
to learn how to take this natural and instinctive element 
of music and use it for God's glory. For all things are 
to praise God. Not only the church but all material things 
and all activities. " Praise the Lord from the earth, ye 
dragons;" do not slay the dragons; St. George was mis- 
taken. Make the dragons praise God — '^ and all deeps, 
fire and hail " — the fire that consumes our houses, the hail 
that breaks in our windows; "fruitful trees" — yes, of 
course, they will; " and all trees" — those that do not bear 
fruits, also ; " beasts and all cattle, creeping things, flying 
fowl, kings of the earth" — royal in their palaces — "and 
all people" — peasants in their poverty; "young men 
and maidens, old men and children." "Let everything 
that hath breath praise the Lord." 

In the third place, this world which God has made, and 



THE USE AND ABUSE OF GOD S GIFTS. 1 29 

which He has given to His children, we are to use as not 
abusing it. 

" But this I say, brethren. The time is short. It re- 
maineth that both they that have wives be as though they 
had none ; and they that weep, as though they wept not ; 
and they that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not ; and 
they that buy, as though they possessed not ; and they that 
use this world, as not abusing it. For the fashion of this 
world passeth away." 

You are to use the world in the recognition of the fact, 
all the time, that the fashion of the world passeth away. 
This is what Christ says : " The body is more than raiment, 
the life is more than meat." The inward, that to which 
life is to serve, is more than the outward, that which serves 
the life. We are in the world ; but if we are disciples of 
Christ we believe that we are passing through this world to 
another ; that this world is the educator and the preparer, 
and that we are here for the development of a higher and 
more splendid nature and a higher and more splendid life. 

Now, when we take the temporal and the transient and 
make them fail to minister to the spiritual, we are abusing 
the world ; and when we take the temporal and the transient 
and make them minister to the spiritual and the eternal 
we are using the world. There are two common abuses in 
our time, which are after all very much the same, though 
the outward manifestation is different. The one is care, 
and the other is luxury. There is a familiar proverb that 
runs something like this : It is not worth while to kill your- 
self to keep yourself. It is a very homely text, but it is a 
very useful one. There are men who are killing themselves 
to keep themselves, and there are a great many women 
who are killing themselves to keep themselves. You have 
no right to do it. What doth it profit a man, or a woman 
9 



130 THE USE AND ABUSE OF GOD'S GIFTS. 

either, to gain the whole world and sacrifice life in the proc- 
ess? If it is wearing out your life to keep house on your 
present scale, change the scale. You have no right to wear 
out your life for the sake of your own luxury, that you 
would agree ; but you have no right to wear out your life 
for the sake of your children's luxury, or your husband's 
luxury, either. There are women who are destroying them- 
selves to maintain spotlessness, or to maintain order, or to 
maintain show and appearance and semblance equal to their 
neighbor's ; women who are housekeepers, and not home- 
keepers j women who are breaking themselves down — aye, 
and though they know it not, breaking their children down 
and their husbands down by the very sacrifice of the soul to 
the material thing. And there are men who are doing the 
same ; men who can buy any number of pictures and can- 
not enjoy one ; men who could buy great libraries but never 
want to read a book unless it is a ledger or a daybook ; 
men who can purchase all luxuries, but have brought on 
dyspepsia by the way they have done their work, so that 
they cannot eat what is on their table. New York City 
and Brooklyn are full of men who have undermined their 
lives in the endeavor to get things. 

That is the one abuse of the world — to put thing above 
life; and the other abuse is luxury. What is luxury? 
What is comfort for one person is luxury to another. What 
was luxury yesterday is comfort to-day. What is luxury? 
Anything is legitimate comfort which ministers to the higher 
life; and anything is illegitimate luxury which enervates 
and degrades the higher life. You cannot draw a clear 
line. You cannot say diamonds are a luxury and flowers 
are not. You cannot say beauty in art, color in a picture 
is legitimate and beauty of color in a dress is not. I re- 
member reading some years ago an article in an English 
review on the question whether women ought to have dia* 



THE USE AND ABUSE OF GOD S GIFTS. I3I 

monds, which argued at great length that it was wrong, and 
1 remembered, as I read it, a Httle story told by Henry 
Ward Beecher : " One day when I was at work in the 
garden cultivating flowers a very serious-minded deacon 
passed that way and looked over the fence. ^ Henry, I am 
sorry to see you wasting your time over flowers.* " And 
says Henry : ^^ I should like to have asked him what God 
made flowers for, but I did not quite dare.'* He grew 
braver afterwards. If precious stones are not legitimate 
objects of beauty why did God make them? Are they the 
tares the devil has sown ? When a woman wears a diamond 
or a pearl or a precious stone of any kind because it has 
beauty, that is legitimate, if she has money enough ; and, 
on the other hand, when she wears it to outshine her neigh- 
bor, that is illegitimate. Taste in dress is right; and 
fashion in dress — well, that is mainly wrong. Dressmaking 
ought to be an art, and not merely an imitation. To wear 
the same kind of a bonnet that somebody else wears, when 
it is in good taste for somebody else and hideous for you, 
is unchristian as well as bad taste. The fundamental 
principle in life is this : Everything must minister to the 
higher life. 

I am glad we are growing rich ; I am glad we are get- 
ting large wealth and wealthy men ; I am glad we are having 
finer houses and finer furniture and finer clothing ; but who 
can fail to see that the larger houses and the finer clothing 
and the greater wealth are bringing in temptation. And this 
is the temptation : to care for things, not life. All things 
that will minister to the life of the community are legiti- 
mate; and all those things which enervate and degrade 
and deteriorate life and eat it out are illegitimate, whether 
they eat it out by the griping and poisonous bite of care, 
or whether they eat it out by the luxurious and the entranc- 
ing and the death-sleep producing embrace of luxury. 



132 THE USE AND ABUSE OF GOD'S GIFTS. 

Care is a serpent that has fangs — it poisons ; and luxun' is 
the anaconda that Tisinds himself around you in soft em- 
brace and crushes you to death. 

The whole world is God's, and the whole world is ours, 
and the whole world is ours to use as not abusing it. Be- 
cause — now I come to my cHmax — we are to do what Christ 
did ; we are to overcome the world. Not surrender to it, 
not compromise with it, not surrender to a part of it, 
not withdraw from a part of it and give it up as a hopeless 
task. We are to overcome the world, and the whole world. 
There is nothing in the world that Christ did not come to 
redeem. Nothing, nothing. You cannot draw a line and 
say that all on this side is religious and all on that side 
secular. There is no such line. The Christian church was 
cruel, it was Hcentious. It pampered men at the top with 
wealth, it b^ordened a great many men at the bottom with 
povert}\ It had begging friars on the one hand, and the 
rich on the other. It was a corrapt church, a cruel church, 
a worldly church and a selnsh church, and Christ had to 
redeem it ; he still has to redeem it. He had to redeem 
literature. The Greek literat-are pandered to vice, it did 
promote iniquit}': some of it I ^ish were not studied 
in our colleges to-day. Christ had to redeem art. Art 
was made to minister to sensuaht}*. He is still redeeming 
art. The church, on the whole, to-day is ministering to the 
higher life. Literature, on the whole, is ministering to the 
higher life. Art is : music is. Ever}'thing is to minister 
to it when he is through with the work of redemption. 
There are some newspapers which make me feel it a pretty 
diiticult task to redeem the press. But so long as the 
press counts itself simply a mercantile venture, so long as 
it is conducted on the principle of gi\ing men what they 
want, so long as it abandons its high vocation, which is to be 
a leader of men and a creator of hie, and only panders 



THE USE AND ABUSE OF GOD S GIFTS. 1 33 

to the passions of evil men, so long as it shows enterprise 
without discrimination and gathers in its grouping all man- 
ner of news, good and bad, noble and worldly, and throws 
it out in one great waste-basket before you every morning 
in the week, so long as it is doing this work— what shall we 
do ? Take no newspapers ? Shall we look askance on all 
reporters and pressmen, hoping they will treat us well in 
their papers though we never treat them well in our parlors? 
No, we are to redeem the press by not bringing into our 
homes — we have virtue enough for that now, I believe — nor 
buying in the horse-cars the paper we should be ashamed 
to have our wife see us reading in our home ; we are to dis- 
criminate, take the clean paper, leave the unclean paper 
alone ; treat the reporter as a gentleman who treats you as 
a gentleman, and bow the other reporter out as quickly as 
we can. 

What are we to do with the drama? Abolish it ? I used 
to think so. I used to say you cannot redeem the theater. 
I confess now, when I look at the posters, I am very doubt- 
ful about it at times. But still I am sure we cannot close 
the theater. I know we cannot do that. What shall we 
do with this mimic art ? I have wondered sometimes what 
we ministers would be if we had been treated as the world, 
until very recently, has treated actors. If we were as- 
sumed to be licentious, vicious, profane, unworthy of decent 
companionship ; if we were ostracized ; if we were treated 
as the English law at one time treated them, pronouncing 
them vagabonds, I wonder whether we should not become 
licentious and ignorant and vagabonds. 

We are to conquer the world, and the whole world. I 
know this is a dangerous sermon to preach. But truth is 
always dangerous, and the only thing that is safe is plati- 
tudes. I know there are young people who will go away 
from this church — at least I am afraid they will — and say 



134 THE USE AND ABUSE OF GODS GIFTS. 

that I have given them color and endorsement to plunge 
into the dance and into drinking and into all festivities, be- 
cause I have said the whole world is theirs. I say the 
whole world is God's, and it is yours if you are a child of 
God and are using it in God's service and in no other way. • 
If the theater sends you back to life tired, uninterested in 
your work, unfitted for it, you have no right to go to the 
theater; and if, on the contrary, the theater rests your 
brain, relieves you from the stress and strain of care, and 
you go back after an evening of pleasure passed at the 
theater refreshed and invigorated to take hold of your work 
with a new vigor and a new enterprise, then you have a 
right to go. You are to determine every question by this 
one fundamental test : Does it make you more worthy to 
be a child of God and do God's work in the world? You 
are to measure the Sabbath, you are to measure the church, 
you are to measure recreation, you are to measure the dance, 
you are to measure cards, you are to measure everything by 
this one test : Does it help me to live a better, nobler, 
larger, wiser, manlier life? If it does, it is yours; if it 
does not, it is not yours, and that it belongs to somebody 
else does not make it yours. 

^'I have overcome the world," said Christ. He lived in 
it. John the Baptist came neither eating nor drinking. 
Christ himself came eating and drinking, and men said, A 
wine bibber and a glutton. They lied, and they knew they 
lied, and the world knew they lied. The world knew it 
then, and has known it ever since. He went into social 
life, but he went so pure, so high, with such self-abnegation 
and such grace that the lie never adhered to him. Men 
have charged him with fanaticism, with being impracticable. 
But never from that day to this has the charge of being self- 
indulgent and self-seeking adhered to him. Go with his 
spirit. Then you may go anywhere. 



THE USE AND ABUSE OF GOD'S GIFTS. 1 35 

Men think or say that there are some things worldly men 
may do, but Christians must not and we reverse it : we say 
that a Christian may do things that a man not a Christian 
cannot do. And the better Christian he is the more safe 
it is for him to do it. If he is full of the spirit of conse- 
cration, if he loves God with all his heart and soul, if he is 
pure in all the atoms of his blood, he may see what other 
men cannot see, he can go with safety where men of less 
courage and less steadfast cannot go. Freedom belongs to 
the children of God. 

When war was threatened in this country there were 
three parties. There was one that said we must compromise 
with the South, we must accede to its commands, we must 
do what it asks us ; and there was another party that said, 
No, we cannot do that, we will separate, let the erring 
sisters go in peace ; but the great North rose up, saying we 
will not compromise and we will not let the erring sisters 
go in peace, and we will not rest until this flag of ours floats 
over every rood of territory and over every ward and all 
men are loyal to the flag. It was a great undertaking, but 
we did it ; and loyalty to Jesus Christ does not mean less 
than loyalty to the flag. 

You have no right to compromise and do what the world 
does because the world does it ; this is not being a Chris- 
tian. You are to live by Christian principles, and you 
have no right to abandon some part of the world, and say, 
That belongs to the world, that belongs to the devil, I leave 
it alone. You cannot let your erring sister go in peace. 
She won't let you go in peace. No, no. The function of 
the Christian church is to take the world and the whole 
world and all material things and all activities and conse- 
crate them to the service of God, and thus make them 
serve God because they serve humanity. Then as you live 
you will from time to time have to say, '^ In the world I 



136 THE USE AND ABUSE OF GOD'S GIFTS. 

have tribulation," you will be scoffed at, you will have 
obloquy, you will be sneered at for your Puritan principles, 
no doubt, but when you look back you will be able to say 
triumphantly, " I have overcome the world.'' 



" 



JOY IS IN SERVICE. 

" Come, for all things are now ready, ^^ 

{Luke, xiv, 20.) 

Christ had been invited into the house of a Pharisee, 
who had made a feast for him, and as they sat at meat one 
of the guests, a pious man, said, '' Blessed are they that 
shall eat bread in the kingdom of God." Christ was ac- 
customed to take advantage of social occasions to utter 
spiritual truth, and this man, conventional in his character, 
was perhaps inspired by this example of Christ Himself to 
utter a spiritual truth ; and this is what he said : " Blessed 
are they that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God." 

No doubt he thought that he believed this, but Christ 
said to him in effect, You are mistaken in thinking that 
you believe it. Men do not think it will be blessed to eat 
bread in the kingdom of God ; for the kingdom of God is 
as one making a feast, and he sends out to the guests, and 
says to them, " Come, all things are now ready." And, 
instead of wanting to come in and eat bread in this king- 
dom of God, they all begin to make excuse. One says, I 
have houses, I must go to look at them ; and another, I 
have bought a yoke of oxen, I must go to prove them ; and 
another, I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot 
come. You think that you think you want to enter heaven, 
but you are mistaken. You do not really want to get to 
heaven, because when heaven is open to you you do not 

137 



138 JOY IS IN SERVICE. 

enter in ; you make a reason for not entering in. You are. 
mistaken, says Christ, in thinking that heaven is some- 
thing future ; you are mistaken in thinking that you must 
die in order to get there. It is here ; the invitation has 
come to you ; Come, everything is ready. But, after all, 
you do not want to come, you wait and stand outside. 

You will observe that in this parable Christ says nothing 
about the excuses which men do in point of fact make. 
No man really says, openly and publicly, I cannot be a 
Christian because I have some houses, I cannot be a Chris- 
tian because I am too poor, I cannot be a Christian because 
I have a wife and family. One man says, I cannot be a 
Christian because I do not believe in the Trinity ; another 
man, I cannot be a Christian because I am not good 
enough ; another man, I cannot be a Christian because the 
church is not good enough. These are the excuses which 
men actually make for not coming into the kingdom of 
God. And Christ does not pay any attention to them. 
He does not really think they are worth answering, so He 
sweeps them all aside as false excuses, and comes at the 
heart of the real reason which keeps men from the kingdom 
of God — property, business, society. 

Come, everything is ready. But then, if you come, and 
if you have some property, you must bring the property 
with you. You cannot come into the kingdom of God and 
leave the property outside. And if you come and bring 
your property with you, you come bringing yourself and 
your property under the laws of the kingdom of God ; 
and the law of the kingdom of God is that acquisition is a 
means, never an end. Property is an instrument to be 
used in God's service, not something to be used and spent 
by yourself. Do you want to come ? Do you want to take 
all that you have and all that you are and lay them on 
God's altar? Do you want to say, that property which I 



JOY IS IN SERVICE. 1 39 

have is not something I have in order to make more prop- 
erty, not something I have in order to give more enter- 
tainments, it is something I have to use for God's service 
and the service of my fellow-men ? If you do want to say 
this there is nothing to prevent your coming. This is the 
way we must imagine that will be done in heaven. We 
cannot conceive of a covetous or pleasure- seeking man in 
the kingdom of heaven. There men will not see how 
much they can get, but how much they can give and how 
far what they have will go in rendering service. '^ Let this 
mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being 
in the form of God, thought equality with God not a prize 
to be reached after/' That is heaven. To have that kind 
of spirit, that what you have does not count as a possession, 
and what somebody else has that is greater does not count 
as something you are seeking, but what you have and what 
you can get counts as something whereby you can serve 
others. Do you really want this spirit ? I wonder how many 
in this congregation really do in their heart of hearts want 
the kind of spirit which would lead them to say. All that I 
have belongs to God. What is mine is mine ; that is the 
American motto ; what is mine is God's, that is the motto 
of the kingdom of God. If as you came to church this 
morning somebody had come to you and said, I know an 
investment that will certainly pay you ten per cent, if you 
put a thousand dollars into it, you might not put the 
thousand dollars there, but you would be much obliged to 
your friend and would say so. If another man should come 
and say, I know where you can give a thousand dollars, and 
it will do a great deal of good, I do not think you would be 
so much obliged to him, do you? But that is the kingdom 
of God. It is the chance to do good with money. That 
is heaven. 

There was once a rich young man who came to Christ ; 



I40 JOY IS IN SERVICE. 

he came running — he was eager; he kneeled down — he 
was reverent ; he appealed to Christ as " Good Master " — 
he was honoring the Christ. After Christ had told him to 
keep the commandments, he asked, "What lack I yet?" 
and Christ looked on him and said, " Go sell that which you 
have, give to the poor; take your acquisitions and use 
them for the service of men." And he went away sorrowful. 
He thought he wanted the kingdom of God, but he did not. 
He did not really want to come into that state of life in 
which all that he had should be used in the service of men 
and for the glory of God. There are young men in this 
congregation who think they want to go to heaven. They 
are mistaken; they do not. Heaven means a place in 
which activity is service ; and they have come here to New 
York to engage in activity for self-service. They are full 
of ambition; they want to accomplish great things for 
themselves and for their family ; they want to succeed, and 
dollar marks are the measure of success. But Christ comes 
to them and says, " You are mistaken, joy is not in success, 
joy is not in mere achievement, joy is in service." The 
object of business is to serve man ; that is the only thing 
worth living for ; so to live as to leave the world richer, 
happier, better, wiser and nobler for having lived in it ; the 
way is open to you, come. You think you want to go to 
heaven. Heaven is here. You have not to wait to die, 
the door is open. It is service. Christ took upon Himself 
the form of a servant. That is the kingdom of heaven. 
But you do not want that. When He said to some fisher- 
men, Follow me ! they left their nets and places and fol- 
lowed Christ, they had come into heaven, because they 
wanted the best service, and they saw a chance for them to 
do a better service in preaching than in fishing. That is 
not true of everybody. The pulpit would be better if some 
men left preaching and went to fishing, and it would not be 



JOY IS IN SERVICE. 141 

SO well if all the fishermen went into the pulpit ; but the 
fundamental truth is this: to go not where you can get 
most money, not where you can get most good, but to take 
life as a service, to be in the form of the servant as Christ 
was, is heaven. Do you want it? 

And another man said, I have married a wife, and there- 
fore I cannot come. A quaint old writer asks why he did 
not come and bring his wife with him, and this is not a 
mere verbal quip, it is a keen, sharp way of putting a pro- 
found truth. If some persons are kept out of the king- 
dom of heaven by their property and others by their busi- 
ness, a great many are kept out of the kingdom of heaven 
by society. What is society for? What is the object of 
it? Why, society is a place in which we interchange life — 
at least it ought to be ; a place where I give you my 
thoughts and you give me your thoughts ; I give you my 
experience, you give me your experience ; I give you some- 
thing of my life, you give me something of your life. In 
many ways it is better than our formal service here, where 
I am trying to give life, and you give to me only through 
your eyes and attention. Society is a market-place in 
which life is interchanged. What a splendid opportunity 
that gives for doing Christ's work in the world, for car- 
rying Christ's spirit, faith and hope and love and giving 
it to those who have not faith and hope and love. But do 
you want that kind of society ? Is that what you go into 
society for? Do you and I go into it in order that we may 
give what God has given to us ; not always by preaching, 
not always by talking what people call religion, not by for- 
mal utterances, but by carrying the life in our hearts and 
letting the life shine out simply, naturally and of itself? 
This very parable illustrates this truth : 

'^ Then said he also to him that bade him. When thou 
makest a dinner or a supper, call not thy friends, nor thy 



142 JOY IS IN SERVICE. 

brethren, neither thy kinsmen, nor thy rich neighbors ; lest 
they also bid thee again, and a recompense be made thee." 

As though that were something to be dreaded. Do not 
give a party to people who could invite you, because you 
might then be invited to a party. Do not give a reception 
to people who could ask you, because you might be invited 
by them to a reception again. 

" But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, 
the lame, the blind ; and thou shalt be blessed : for they 
cannot recompense thee : for thou shalt be recompensed at 
the resurrection of the just." 

Neither this nor anything else which Christ said is to be 
taken literally, and the spirit taken out of it by simply ac- 
cepting the letter. But the spirit is this : Society is, like 
business and property, for service. Now, do you want to 
come into the kingdom of God? Do you want to bring 
your receptions, your companionships, your friendships — 
do you want to bring all these things and make them the 
media by which you shall carry life out to others, receiving 
something from their life again, and all together coming 
nearer to God's love ? If so, do it ; that is all. You can- 
not ask a better opportunity. You have the chance. The 
very next reception you go to, go from your knees, and 
carry Christ with you. Ah, do you want heaven ? Is that 
the society you and I really do want? Paul says, " Our 
citizenship is in heaven." Christ says, ^^The kingdom of 
heaven is at hand." The kingdom of heaven is among 
you. It is here and now. 

Paul tells us w^hat the kingdom of heaven means ; let us 
read his definition : '' The kingdom of God is not meat and 
drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy 
Spirit " — or, " in holiness of spirit." Righteousness, peace, 
joy in holiness of spirit; " have you to die to get to heaven? 
I should like to know where you could expect to find in all 



JOY IS IN SERVICE. I43 

the future a better chance to stand for righteousness, or a 
better place in which to stand for righteousness, or a time 
in which men were more needed to stand for righteousness, 
than in this very city of New York, at this very time, after 
this last election. And yet how many citizens are there 
who want to do it ? How many Christians are there who 
really want to put on the armor and go out and stand for 
righteousness and truth and honor against all corruption 
and all fraud and all dishonor and all attempts to loot gov- 
ernment for personal pelf? That is heaven. Do you want 
heaven? Well, begin. You never will have a better 
opportunity. 

For peace and peacemaking, where will you find a 
greater possibility? How can you expect in the celestial 
sphere a better opportunity for seeking peace, pursuing 
peace, maintaining the things which make for peace, than 
in this warring, jostling, contending society of ours in 
America? To-day there are some men looking forward 
in hope for war; they want it; they will be glad if this 
country can be forced into war ; they beheve in the glory of 
it ; they have a hope to make something out of the require- 
ments of it, or they think it will bring larger business. For 
one reason or other they want war. And then again there 
are other persons who do not quite dare to say, I would like 
war, but they would really be glad if conscience would say 
to them. You must go to war. They really would like to 
have the country driven into war by the force of a great 
moral sentiment. And then there are some who are desir- 
ing peace and longing for peace and praying for peace, and 
who would only be forced into war by the law of the inex- 
orable, by the necessity of an honor that is greater than the 
demand for peace. I wonder where the majority is ; be- 
cause the kingdom of God is peace, and the peacemaker be- 
longs to the king4om of Gpd^ .^nd the man who, going every- 



144 JOY IS IN SERVICE. 

where carries with him the spirit of peace, is in the king- 
dom of God. 

It is joy in hoHness of spirit. Is that the joy we want? 
We want pleasures of the body, food, raiment, luxury, and 
our struggle with one another is to see who shall get the 
larger houses and the finer raiment and the more splendid 
equipment. We want pleasures of the body and we want 
happiness of the heart; we want wife and children and 
earthly affections ; we appreciate these ; but the joy which 
comes from holiness of the spirit, how covetous are we of 
that? Do you remember how, in almost his last hour, just 
as He was facing the cross, Christ turned to His disciples 
and said, " My joy I give to you." That is joy of the spirit. 
The joy of the soldier who bares his bosom to the bullet. 
The joy of the nurse who gives herself with patient endur- 
ance to the service of the hospital. The joy of the physi- 
cian who carries on his shoulders the burdens of a hundred 
families bowed by sickness ; the joy of suffering for others. 
The joy of the mother — greatest joy that ever the world 
knows — sweetest song of joy that is ever sung from out this 
weeping world. And yet is this the joy that we are most 
covetous of, most eager to get? that you are most covetous 
of, that you are most eager to have ? Come, all thmgs are 
ready. If you want the kingdom of God buckle on your 
armor and fight for it. If you want the kingdom of heaven 
that means peace, and joy and holiness of spirit, go where 
you can carry the pacific spirit and self-sacrificing love. 

Or turn to Christ's definition of heaven : 

" In such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh. 
Who, then, is a faithful and wise servant, whom his lord 
hath made ruler over his household, to give them meat in 
due season ? Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when 
he cometh shall find so doing. Verily, I say unto you, 
That he shall make him ruler over all his goods." 



JOY IS IN SERVICE, I45 

When the lord returns, who is it that comes into 
heaven? The man who has been faithful in distributing to 
others. Why? Because he has been faithful over a few 
things, he can be entrusted to be a ruler over larger things. 
And in the next chapter he makes this clearer. He draws 
the sharp Hne. He puts the sheep on one side and the 
goats on the other, and says, '^ Come, ye blessed of my 
Father, into the kingdom prepared for you." Who are 
these? Why, those who saw men in sickness and visited 
them, in hunger and fed them, in nakedness and clothed 
them. This was the kingdom of heaven on earth. This will 
be kingdom of heaven in heaven ; a better chance, a larger 
service. You have been faithful over a few things, I will make 
you ruler over many things. What is a ruler? A man who 
has an opportunity, a splendid opportunity, to bear the 
burdens of a great nation and render a great service through 
the opportunity which is conferred upon him. Now, have 
you to die for that? Are there no sick whom you can 
visit? Are there no hungry whom you can feed ? Are 
there none in prison whom you can go to? Are there 
no suffering whom you can comfort? Is there no oppor- 
tunity here in America for doing this service that belongs 
to the kingdom of heaven and is the kingdom of heaven? 
Must you die to find the poor and suffering and sick and 
needy ? Those who will go from this house, this afternoon, 
to minister to the poor, to the sick, to the needy, in our 
Sunday-schools and hospitals, have just begun the kind of 
joyous work that will belong to them in heaven. I wonder 
what will become of the man who, after he has done it for 
four or five years, says, I have served my turn, I want to 
stop ! The kingdom of heaven is love and joy and peace 
and service. It is here. Come, all things are ready, if you 
want it, if you want if. 

Consider who will come into this kingdom. 
10 



146 JOY IS IN SERVICE. 

" And they all with one consent began to make excuse. 
The first said unto him, I have bought a piece of ground, 
and I must needs go and see it ; I pray thee, have me ex- 
cused. And another said, I have bought five yoke of oxen, 
and I go to prove them ; I pray thee have me excused. 
And another said, I have married a wife, and therefore I 
cannot come. So that servant came, and shewed his lord 
these things. Then the master of the house being angry, 
said to his servant, Go out quickly into the streets and lanes 
of the city, and bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, 
and the halt, and the blind. And the servant said. Lord, 
it is done as thou hast commanded, and yet there is room. 
And the lord said unto the servant. Go out into the high- 
ways and hedges J and compel them to come in, that my 
house may be filled." 

The halt, the lame, the blind, those who are not yet come 
into the kingdom and know that they are not yet come into 
it ; these are the ones. Those who feel the need and know 
the need in themselves, they are the ones who are pressing 
into the kingdom. If you want this put still more specific- 
ally and with more vigor, turn to another parable : 

" A certain man had two sons ; and he came to the first, 
and said. Son, go to work to-day in my vineyard. He an- 
swered and said, I will not ; but afterward he repented, and 
went. And he came to the second, and said likewise. And 
he answered and said, I go, sir : and went not. Whether 
of them twain did the will of his father ? They say unto 
him. The first. Jesus saith unto them. Verily, I say unto 
you. That the publicans and the harlots go into the king- 
dom of God before you." 

Those are the maimed and the halt and the blind. A 
pubhcan who beats upon his breast and says, God be mer- 
ciful unto me, a sinner, goes before the member of the or- 
thodox church who says, I thank God I am not as other 
men are. The harlot who comes weeping at Christ's feet 
and bathes his feet with her tears and kisses them and wipes 



JOY IS IN SERVICE. 147 

away the tears with the tresses of her head goes into the 
kingdom of God before the Pharisee who has made the feast 
for Christ. 

Is this the society that you and I want? Sinners who 
have repented? Publicans and harlots who are coming in 
because God loves those who need love, and not those who 
are worthy of His love ? Is this the kind of society we 
want ? Well, we can have it. You have not to die to find 
it. There is one institution here in Brooklyn which gathers 
under its roof the women whom we call " Lost '* women. 
Lost, because we shut them out of our doors and debar 
them from our sympathies. There are a few women in 
Brooklyn struggling hard to carry on that charity. Not 
many ; it is hard work, because there are not a great many, 
after all, who want the society of harlots who have repented 
of their sin and want to seek a better life. 

Our citizenship is in heaven. The kingdom of heaven is 
among you. We have not to die to get there. It is love ; 
you can love now. It is righteousness ; you can arm your- 
self for righteousness now. It is peace ; you can carry the 
spirit of peace with you now. It is hope ; you can look 
forward with hope to that which is not seen now. It is 
service ; you can give yourself to service now. The paint- 
ers pictured Christ with a halo around His head. It was 
but a poor mechanical contrivance to interpret the sublime 
reality. He did not come from heaven to earth. He brought 
heaven with Him to the earth. He walked in heaven, and 
heaven environed Him, and He lived in the midst of heaven 
while He was yet upon the earth, and in service and in 
sacrifice for love's sake He found His heaven, and was the 
Son of God because He was the Son of infinite, unfailing, 
ever-patient service. And he says to you and to me, Fol- 
low me ; the kingdom of heaven is at hand ; come, for all 
things are ready. 



148 JOY IS IN SERVICE. 

Do you like this feast? Sit down at it; but do not say, 
Blessed are they that shall eat bread in the kingdom of 
God, and then stay out and away from the table that is 
spread here, because you care for property or business or 
society more than you do for the life of God among the 
children of men. 






AN EASTER MESSAGE. 

« * * * Jesus Christy who hath abolished deaths and hath brought 
life and immortality to light through the gospel." 

(II Timothy, /., lO.) 

He brought them to light ; then they existed before. He 
did not create the life nor the immortality except as bring- 
ing to light that which was before, in some true sense cre- 
ates it. As the writing with invisible ink upon a parch- 
ment is made by the heat to appear when it is brought to 
the fire, so the life and immortality written in the aspira- 
tions and the desires of humanity Christ made to appear. 
As a seed has in itself the secret and germ of a future life, 
and yet that life lies undiscovered until planted in the 
ground and surrounded by right conditions, the seed bursts 
into its integuments and pushes forth the life into the sun- 
light, so in humanity there was dormant life and immor- 
tality, and Christ was the sun ; Christ, the rain ; Christ, 
the soil, which made this life and immortality burst forth. 

Life existed, but men did not know it, they did not un- 
derstand themselves. It exists to-day, but men do not 
know it, they do not understand themselves. In the meas- 
ure in which the Easter message is apprehended and un- 
derstood, this life and immortality which is in men is 
brought to light. The life brings the immortality to light, 
and the faith in immortality nourishes the Hfe. For life and 
immortaUty are not merely future terms. Man has in him- 

149 



ISO AN EASTER MESSAGE. 

self an immortal life ; has in himself something which is 
incorruptible and divine. Christianity is a revelation of 
what man is, not merely of what man shall be. 

If you consider carefully the teachings of Christ in the 
Four Gospels, you will observe that He says very little 
directly about immortality. He does not argue. There is 
nothing akin to the Phaedo of Socrates in the Four Gos- 
pels. Christ takes the immortal life in men for granted 
and appeals to it, and by His appeal He Himself evokes 
it. He brings it out of them by assuming that it is in them, 
by addressing Himself to that in them which other teach- 
ers had failed to see. He speaks the language of faith, the 
language of one who knows the invisible world, and men 
begin to open their eyes and look about them and see that 
there is an invisible world. As a mother says to her 
child, still sleeping and apparently just opening its eyes : 
'^Listen and you can hear the singing of the birds," and 
the child, awakening, hears the singing of the birds out- 
side, so Christ said to men, just awakening from their 
sleep : " Hark ! " and men listened and heard the voices 
which they might have heard before had they but heark- 
ened before. He spoke with an abounding hope, which 
appealed to the sleeping hope in men, and the sleep- 
ing hope in men responded, and they who before never 
had hoped, began to hope to escape bondage, to be 
delivered from themselves, to receive something they 
knew not what, but better than anything they had ever 
known. He spoke with love. Reformers and preachers 
had supposed that men would respond to fear or to au- 
thority ; prophets had spoken of law, thundering ; proph- 
ets had spoken with threats, frightening : Christ spoke of 
mercy and of love, and, lo ! where one man would re- 
spond to fear, a hundred sprang up answering to love. 
Love was in their hearts, and they knew it not ; and other 



AN EASTER MESSAGE. 151 

men knew it not ; but when He spoke the language of 
love their hearts answered. More men have responded, 
a thousand-fold, I suppose, to the Parable of the Prodigal 
Son, which is but the word of love, than ever responded to 
threat of penalty. For this was characteristic of Christ, 
that He saw in men the faith and the hope and the love, 
as the sun sees the life in the seed, as the skilled chemist 
sees the writing, invisible, on the parchment, and then 
made men themselves see what was dormant within them. 
He brought the life and the immortality in man to light. 
In this was the secret of His power ; in this was the secret 
of the power of the early church. He went everywhere, 
and His apostles went everywhere, saying to men. You are 
children of God. He did not argue this. He asserted 
it. When ye pray, he said, say Our Father. That was 
enough, and their hearts responded, and they began to 
say Our Father. Men and women who had been without 
hope, who had been without love, without faith, or at least 
without this consciousness of faith and hope and love, be- 
gan to flock about Him, because by His words. His pres- 
ence. His life, He evoked in them the faith, the hope the 
love which was dormant but unrecognized. And they 
wondered and rejoiced in the resurrection taking place 
with them. When He died and His apostles went forth, 
their message was, primarily, a message of the resurrection ; 
not merely that this man had died and come forth from the 
grave again, but that He had Himself possessed an incor- 
ruptible life, and that all men possessed in themselves an 
incorruptible life. The message was carried forward into 
Greece and Rome, to slaves, to freedmen, to men in bond- 
age, to men who had counted themselves but as dumb, 
driven cattle, to men who had counted themselves but as 
machines — to them there came the word, You are men, 
you are children of (lod, you have in yourselves an im- 



152 AN EASTER MESSAGE. 

mortal, eternal life, you are worthier than you thought you 
were. The first growth of the Christian church was less a 
conversion than a resurrection, less a conscious turning 
away from sin than a waking from unconscious death into 
conscious life. 

In the Republic Plato put the mechanics among the 
serfs and slaves ; but here was one who came to be the 
Redeemer of the world. King of Kings and Lord of Lords, 
and He was a carpenter. It is impossible for us to con- 
ceive the shock of glad surprise that entered into common 
hearts when this message came to men. The world's Re- 
deemer, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the Son of 
God, He who sits upon the throne, He before whom the 
angels and the archangels veil their faces. He has been 
not only a man, but He has been such a man as you are — 
a carpenter, a mechanic, belonging to the lower classes of 
society ; and in His coming, by His very presence, by His 
personality, by the very attitude He assumed, by the very 
life He led, more even than by the words He spoke. He bears 
testimony that you are God's sons ; rise up into the life 
that belongs to you and take it. So the first four centuries 
of the Christian era were centuries of resurrection. They 
were a rising of the dead into life. This is the first Easter 
message. You and I are sons of God. You Christian men, 
who have long walked in Christian ways, who have long 
followed Christ, you are sons of God. You who have 
just begun, you are sons of God. You who are questioning 
whether you will begin or not, you are sons of God. You 
who have never thought of joining the church, you who 
have never thought of being Christians, you who are sat- 
isfied to live your present life and be a mere machine for 
gathering gold or silver or printed paper money, you who 
measure a man by the amount of money he makes and not 
by the use he is able to put it to, even you are sons of 



AN EASTER MESSAGE. 1 53 

God. You proud people, you self-satisfied people, you 
young men who think that there is nothing in life but suc- 
cess, and nothing in success but dollar marks, you are sons 
of God. There is not a man here so discouraged, so dis- 
heartened ; not a man so self-conceited — and he is worst 
of all — who is not a son of God. There is something bet- 
ter in life for you than is bounded by the present horizon. 
There is something better for you than simply to delve 
and dig. You are immortal ; you are a child of God. 
You have in you a faith though you do not know it ; eyes 
though you have never opened them ; the possibihties of a 
hope if you could only arouse it ; a sleeping and splendid 
life — oh, that you would but let the Christ this Easter 
morn awaken it ! 

He has brought to us this message that we are children 
of God, and, therefore, life is better than we thought it 
was. He has brought to us the message that our neighbors 
are children of God, and, therefore, they are more worth 
working for than we thought they were. He has given a 
new meaning to despotism, for the evil of despotism is not 
that it crushes the joy out of life ; it is this, that it crushes 
life itself out of men and makes them no longer able to 
live the life they ought to live. And he has given a new 
meaning to liberty, for there is no man so degraded, so 
down-pressed, so belittled by long centuries of degradation 
but that there is for him a life and an immortahty which 
can be brought to light. 

Judaism was democratic. There was no caste ; no aris- 
tocracy ; the people stood in their constitution upon one 
common level. But they did not know why ; they did not 
understand the reason of their own free institutions. Jesus 
Christ poured the light of His life on humanity, and showed 
that all men had in them some divine life, and, therefore, 
that the difference between them are simply differences 



154 AN EASTER MESSAGE. 

in stages of development. You are great deal better 
than the besotted negro? yes, you are to-day; a great 
deal wiser than the Indian? yes, to-day; a great deal 
more intelligent than the superstitious ? yes, to-day ! Just 
as the tree that has grown ten feet high is a great deal 
more than the tree that has two leaves above the surface 
of the ground — to-day. But the fundamental message of 
Christianity is this : that there is a real quality in men be- 
cause a real life in all, and now men are worth working 
for and worth fighting for. There is no man in all this 
world who is not worth working for, since Christ has 
worked for all ; no man in all this world who is not worth 
dying for, since Christ has died for all. No longer can 
we draw a line and put on one side men like the negro 
slaves, and say, they are not worth it, and on the other 
side an Anglo-Saxon race and say, they are worth it. All 
men are men ; all men are God's children. To live, to suf- 
fer, to serve, to die for the feeblest, the poorest, the most 
ignorant, the most unworthy, is to die, to live, to suffer, 
to serve one who has in himself the undevoloped germs of 
infinite worth. 

As Christ has given a new inspiration so He has given 
a new method to philanthropy and to liberty. Rome did 
not look with indifference upon physical suffering. Men 
were hungry, and great largesses of corn were poured 
out for them. Men were unhappy, and great shows and 
entertainments were provided for them. Roman philan- 
thropy confined itself to making people comfortable or 
happy, or perchance merry, here and now. But Christ has 
shown a better way. His Easter message is something 
different from this. It is no longer merely, feed the hun- 
gry, but so quicken the life of this hungry one that he 
shall be able to feed himself. It is no longer, emancipate 
this race, but put such life and power into men that they 



AN EASTER MESSAGE. 1 55 

shall emancipate themselves. It is a message of self-help ; 
if you will compare the pages of human history you will 
find that helping men to help themselves has been prac- 
tically confined to Christendom. 

A great army has gone out from Great Britain and from 
the United States into India; an army of men, a still 
greater army of women. They have gone there without 
guns or swords. They have gone with the gospel of Jesus 
Christ ; and they have gone in this faith ; that there is in 
the Hindu race a hope, though they are not hopeful ; a 
capacity for progress, though there is no progress evident ; 
a power of love, though there is but little development of 
love; that there are in these far away peoples the same 
elements of character, the same sonship with God that 
there is in the highest and the most developed. They 
have gone in this faith ; that there is a power in the gos- 
pel to awaken that life ; that as there was a resurrection in 
the East in the first four centuries, as there was a resurrec- 
tion in Europe in the Reformation, as there was a resur- 
rection in England under Wesley's teaching, as there has 
been a beginning of resurrection in our own slave states 
under our own great army of teachers and missionaries, 
so in all this world there is nowhere a people but has the 
possibility of resurrection in them; in them a possible 
Christlikeness ; in them a possible development of thrift ; a 
possible intelligence ; a possible faith and hope and love ; 
so that the same message which has awakened life in us 
shall be able to awaken life in them. Faith in immortality 
is not merely a belief that the man who dies and whose 
body is dropped in the grave will by and by rise again ; it 
is that in every man there is the power of an endless life ; 
and in the measure in which that faith in the power of an 
endless life in humanity has been wrought into the conscious- 
ness of the church, just in that measure has come a new 



156 AN EASTER MESSAGE. 

conception of humanity — a new conception that it is 
worth while to work for men. And there has come a new 
conception that the method of doing this work is not 
merely by feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, but 
by inspiring life. Let the message go out that two hundred 
thousand reconcentrados in Cuba are suffering hunger, and 
the whole country will arouse itself to feed them. Let the 
message go out that two hundred thousand negroes in our 
own Nation are ignorant and unkempt, undeveloped and 
uneducated, and ask the churches for a collection to send 
them teachers and missionaries, and it will be a few dollars 
sent with a laggard and reluctant hand. Why? Because, 
after all, we do not more than half beUeve in resurrection ; 
because we have sympathies that respond to cold and to 
hunger, but are not yet ourselves immortal enough to re- 
spond to the appeal that calls for the development of 
manhood itself into divine conditions. 

This faith in immortahty and in life, has given too, a new 
basis for hope and a new inspiration to hope in all work 
for men. For if all our work is confined within the nar- 
row cycle of this time, how trifling is what we can do, and 
how little the result appears to be. But if what we do here 
is but beginning, and there is a future where this work 
will have its chance to fructify, there is another and a bet- 
ter ground for hopefulness. Put a ship load of young 
men with a few elders on an Atlantic vessel, and let them 
sail for ten or fifteen or twenty days, with the assurance 
that at the end of twenty days the ship will founder, and 
they know it — what inspiration is there for these wiser 
men to teach the younger men ! Put these younger men 
on a training ship with the wiser men in charge of them, 
and say to them, When the training has been done, these 
younger men will go out into life where they will render 
service and the training ship becomes a school. This 



AN EASTER MESSAGE. 1 5/ 

world is not an Atlantic steamer that is going to the bot- 
tom, carrying all on board, it is a training school; and 
whatever you do for your fellow men, whatever you do, 
by your example and your influence to help your neigh- 
bor, you are doing for the midshipmen that are going into 
service when death comes. At least this is our Easter 
faith. 

We do not think our labor lost because death suddenly 
carries ofE the one we were laboring with and laboring for. 
Our Easter message has brought us a new concep- 
tion of life, a new conception of pain and suffering as a 
part of the development of life, and, of course, a new con- 
ception of death itself. While men are with us and we can 
see their spiritual activity we can believe, and for the most 
part we do believe that they are more than machines, more 
than animals. But when the last breath is drawn, the last 
sign is given, the lips are closed, and there is no response 
and no manifestation of spirit, then it requires a higher 
faith to beheve in immortality. Up to that time belief in 
the immortal life of the living man has been helped by 
manifestations of the life ; now that manifestations have 
ceased no wonder that men think the life has ceased also. 
And yet if you will know what Easter has done in bring- 
ing life and immortality to light compare — I will not go to 
Pagan literature — what the Hebrew Psalmist says, before 
the resurrection of Christ, with what the Christian Psalm- 
ist says after the resurrection of Christ. I read for this 
contrast from the two selections embodied in the Episcopal 
prayer-book service for the dead : 

" Thou turnest man to destruction : again thou sayest, 
Come agam, ye children of men. For a thousand years in 
thy sight are but as yesterday : seeing that is past as a 
watch in the night. As soon as thou scatterest them they 
are even as asleep : and fade away suddenly like the grass. 



158 AN EASTER MESSAGE. 

In the morning it is green, and groweth up ; but in the 
evening it is cut down, dried up, and withered. For we con- 
sume away in thy displeasure ; and are afraid at thy wrath- 
ful indignation. Thou hast set our misdeeds before thee : 
and our secret sins in the light of thy countenance. For 
when thou art angry all our days are gone ; we bring our 
years to an end, as it were a tale that is told. The days of 
our age are threescore years and ten; and though men 
be so strong that they come to fourscore years : yet is their 
strength then but labor and sorrow; so soon passeth it 
away, and we are gone.*' 

That is the Hebrew psalm of life and death ; contrast 
with it the Christian psalm of life and death : 

^' Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot 
inherit the kingdom of God ; neither doth corruption in- 
herit incorruption. Behold, I show you a mystery ; We 
shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a mo- 
ment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump : for 
the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised in- 
corruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corrupt- 
ible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on 
immortality. So when this corruptible shall have put on 
incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, 
then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, 
Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy 
sting ? O grave, where is thy victory ? The sting of death 
is sin ; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be 
to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord 
Jesus Christ." 

Even the devout and godly Jew, standing at the grave, 
could only say, " Our days are passed, like a tale that is 
told.'* When Christ had brought life and immortality to 
light, the better instructed apostle cries, standing at the 
grave, "Thanks be to God which giveth us the victory.'* 
O you whose loved ones have gone from you, they have 
risen 1 Stand with Paul, not with Moses. If you read the 



AN EASTER MESSAGE. 1 59 

90th psalm from your prayer-book at all, read it only to 
learn on what darkness Christ hath shed the light of His 
life. 

' In the Gallery of American Artists in New York is a 
picture of "Night and Waning Day," the strong figure of 
Night holding in his arms the fainting figure of Waning 
Day, and looking into the face to see the life depart from 
it, and ready to put the extinguisher on Day's torch. I 
want some artist who shall paint for us " Waning Night and 
Rising Day," who shall show — I am no artist and cannot 
paint the picture even in words — who shall show Day taking 
off the mourning garments of the Night robed in black, with 
only a few stars in the heavens to show in the midst of grief 
that the sun is still there, and putting on the world's bridal 
garments, luminous, radiant, woven with flowers ; for Pag- 
anism thinks that day ends in night and sleep is eternal, 
and Christianity believes that night ends in day and life is 
eternal. 



A GODLESS LIFE IS A HOPELESS LIFE. 

« * * * having no hope, and without God in the world^'' 

EphesiafiSy ii.y 12, 

Godless and hopeless go together in Paul's mind. To 
be godless is to be hopeless. There is in our time, though 
perhaps not pecuHar to our time, both a school of philos- 
ophy and a tendency of thought, to the effect that the 
world can get along without God and without religion. 
Not without morality, but without religion; not without 
righteousness, but without God. 

Whether we are growing more or less religious is a ques- 
tion often asked, and not easily answered. If we accept 
the prophet's definition of religion, " What doth the Lord 
require of thee but to do justly, to love mercy and to walk 
humbly with thy God," then I think we may say that the 
tendency in our time on the whole is toward more justice 
and toward more mercy, but it is not so clear that it is to- 
ward a more humble walking with God. There is a larger 
sense of what is due by man to his fellow-man than there 
was, certainly, in the Middle Ages, and there is a greater 
tendency to pitifulness for the weak, the suffering, the err- 
ing, and the sinful than there was in the Middle Ages. 
But is there more devotion, more worshipfulness, more 
faith in an unseen God and an eternal future, or are we 
growing more temporal, more earthy, more inclined to 
banish the eternal world and think only of the present? 

160 



A GODLESS LIFE IS A HOPELESS LIFE. l6l 

That there is such a tendency to Hve only in the present 
can hardly be doubted. It is seen in the publication of 
some books the very object of which is to show that there 
is no use for religion, that religion in the sense of faith in an 
infinite and unseen God belongs to the earlier conditions of 
humanity, and that we are outgrowing it. It is seen in some 
books and many sermons, like the one I am trying to preach 
this morning, to show that there is a necessity for religion 
and for faith in God — books that would not be written and 
sermons that would not be preached if the writer and the 
preacher did not detect or think he detected a tendency 
in the other direction. It is seen in the philosophy of 
agnosticism (the very word came into existence in this 
century) that we can know nothing about the future and 
nothing about God, but that we must make all our calcula- 
tions and live all our lives as though there were no future 
and no God that we could know about. It is seen in a 
very considerable tendency among even religious teachers 
to eliminate what is called the supernatural (what I should 
prefer to call the superhuman) from rehgion and consider 
that Christianity itself is only the highest type of human 
thought and human endeavor. It is seen in the tendency 
to question whether prayer is anything more than the 
expression of a desire or an aspiration, whether there is a 
real communion between the individual soul and God, 
whether God is really influenced by human prayer, as a 
father is influenced by a son's request. It is seen in ques- 
tioning respecting the value of church services and public 
worship and the Sabbath Day and the Bible and religious 
literature. 

Whether we are growing more godless or not, I am not 
sure. If I were to trust the rather pessimistic utterances 
of our time respecting, for instance, the Sabbath and the 

church, I should say church attendance is diminishing and 
II 



1 62 A GODLESS LIFE IS A HOPELESS LIFE. 



Sabbath observance is decreasing. But when I read an- 
cient Hterature, I find precisely the same lament in the olden 
time. I find the old Puritan writers lamenting in almost 
identical language the decay of church worship and the decay 
of Sabbath observance ; I find this same lament in the 
earlier days of England, and in the Middle Ages, and I 
conclude that on the whole the tendency of which I am 
to speak this morning is not peculiar to the nineteenth 
century, but has been in the world in all times. Whether 
it is greater now than in past times I do not care to inquire. 
I doubt whether any definite answer can be given to the 
question. But whether that tendency is stronger to-day 
than it was fifty, a hundred, two hundred years ago or not^ 
of one thing I am personally very sure — that the whole 
fabric of human society and human life as it now is rests 
on faith in God and faith in a future life ; that there is no 
hope for well-ordered society or good government or broad 
and large and profound education or human happiness in 
any aspect of the case, if God is eliminated from life and 
the future is eliminated from life. And when I say God, 
what I mean is, faith that there is in the universe and trans- 
cending the universe, that is transcending the whole of all 
phenomena, a Being who is interpreted to us by our own 
experience, a Being who thinks and who loves and who acts, 
a personal Being. What I mean by religion is not a defini- 
tion or a philosophy or a creed or a moral life, but the per- 
sonal relation of the individual soul and the personal rela- 
tion of society to this personal God. And what I say is 
this : Eliminate this faith from the world, let mankind come 
to beHeve either that there is no personal Being or that 
there is no possible intimate relationship between indi- 
viduals or society and this personal Being, eliminate this 
faith in God and in religion from human life and the hope 
of the world is taken away, the hope for good government, 



I 



A GODLESS LIFE IS A HOPELESS LIFE. 163 

the hope for ordered society, the hope for generous educa- 
tion, the hope for high moral Hfe. 

Imagine, then, for a moment, if you can, this faith gone 
and all that it has brought gone. You are not to consider 
what the effect will be on a single man living in a com- 
munity which believes in God and believes in religion, you 
are not to think what will be the effect on a community 
from which this faith has a good deal faded out, but in 
which it is left dominant and strong in a group of men 
that gather from time to time in the church to express it 
to one another and to carry it to others. You are to con- 
sider the whole faith in God and religion swept away, the 
whole American people (I won't go beyond this continent) 
left without belief in a personal God and in an immortal 
future. We stand, then (this is the hypothesis), on this 
planet ; our life bounds the horizon of our existence ; our 
planet bounds the horizon of our life ; there is nothing be- 
yond. There is no one above ; no one superior to the men 
who are about us ; no one to whom we can look, whom we 
can reverence, on whom we can rely, from whom we can 
accept strength and help and force ; there is no one who 
issues any law j there is no one who embodies or represents 
any principle; there is nothing in righteousness higher 
than the life we see ; nothing in life beyond the present. Im- 
agine for one moment this thoroughly wrought into the 
consciousness of humanity. All the relics of faith in a 
personal God who transcends the universe, all relics of 
faith in the possible communion with such a person, all 
faith in any sense of obligation to him, all sense of any 
peril from His justice, all sense of any hope from His help- 
fulness, all sense of any communion with Him gone, and 
the great mass of fifty or sixty millions of people on this 
continent without a God and without a future, what would 
happen ? 



164 A GODLESS LIFE IS A HOPELESS LIFE. 

In the first place, the institution of religion would be 
gone. The Sabbath would be a holiday. It would not 
even have the sacredness of Fourth of July or Decoration 
Day ; for Fourth of July and Decoration Day have sacred 
national memories, they do appeal to something unselfish 
in man. They appeal to patriotism, they appeal to love of 
country, they appeal to the kind of patriotism and the kind 
of love of country that has suffered martyrdom for the na- 
tion and for others. But that would not be in Sunday. The 
Sunday will be simply a holiday, simply a day for a good 
time. It may still be supported by law. Law may still 
hedge it about, but it will be hedged about just as ineffect- 
ually as the laws which were made limiting the time of 
labor to eight or nine hours or prohibiting child labor or 
limiting woman labor. They will be labor laws ; nothing 
else. It is true that there may still be men who will use 
this day wisely. Probably, they will say we must use 
this day for intellectual education; we must use it for 
physical education ; we must not waste it — ^that will hurt 
us on Monday ; we must not waste our money — that will 
give us less money to spend. But any use of this day for 
the development of the spiritual nature of man, for the 
development of reverence or duty or love, or conscience 
even, in its higher monitions, that they will not seek, be- 
cause there is no such nature in man, there is no immortal 
being, there is no faith that perceives the invisible, there is 
no conscience that recognizes the eternal and unseen prin- 
ciples of right and wrong ; man is only a higher animal, 
his life limited by the cradle at the one side and the grave 
at the other. 

Sunday is taken out, and with the Sunday the Bible is 
gone. Men will study Hebrew literature as they study 
Greek literature, but they will see that if the Bible is not 
something more than Greek Uterature, it is nothing, for 



A GODLESS LIFE IS A HOPELESS LIFE. 165 

the message of the Bible is above all things this : That 
there is a God ; that God is justice, and that God is love, 
and that because He is justice and love, therefore He de- 
mands justice and love of his children. Take that out of 
the Bible, and the Bible is gone. You may take the gods 
out of Homer, and Homer stands, for the message of the 
Odyssey is not the relation in which Ulysses stands to 
Jove ; but take Jehovah out of Job, and Job is gone, be- 
cause the very message of Job is the relationship in which 
one man stands in the time of his suffering to a just and 
righteous God. Take that out and the book is ashes. 
Take the gods out of the orations of Demosthenes, and 
they still stand eloquent and admirable ; but take God out 
of Isaiah, and the book crumbles to pieces, for the whole 
message of Isaiah is of a personal God bringing hope to a 
nation in the time of its poverty and its exile. Take that 
out, and the book is not worth studying. Take God out 
of the Bible, and the Bible does not deserve to be studied. 

With the Sabbath and the Bible the church and the 
Sunday-school will be gone. Still, men may gather in 
their houses on Sunday, but there will be no worship. If 
there is any music, it will be aesthetic. If there is what 
people call prayer, it will be aspiration. There will be no 
coming together to find God ; there will be no coming to- 
gether to worship Him ; there is no quickening of one's di- 
vine life, there is no God, there is no future, there is no 
divine life which we are to quicken one in another. The 
pulpit will be a platform, the sermon will be a lecture, and 
the prayer will be an aspiration. 

The Bible is gone, the church is gone, the Sunday is 
gone, the great fundamental principles of right and wrong 
are gone. Not all right, not all wrong ; but there is no 
longer One who personifies righteousness. He is gone. 
The only conception you can have of right and wrong is 



l66 A GODLESS LIFE IS A HOPELESS LIFE. 

such a conception as you can get from the Ufe of your 
neighbor, the good neighbor and the bad neighbor, the 
prosperous neighbor and the unprosperous neighbor. There 
is no divine Ufe showing itself in creation ; there is no di- 
vine life showing itself in the scattered fragments of life ; 
for there is no divine life. No longer are you now on the 
earth as a prisoner in a dungeon, w^ho sees specks of light 
glinting through the narrow window and knows there is 
sunshine outside. There are no specks of light, there is no 
sunshine outside. And as there is no one to personify 
righteousness, no conception of righteousness except that 
w^hich you can gather from men around you, so there are 
no eternal, essential, vital principles of right and wrong. 
There are empirical rules; that is all. Empirical rules 
that depend not upon the will of a righteous being, not on 
the character of a righteous being, not on the existence of 
eternal righteousness apart from w^hat men have said, rules 
that have been made by society and can only be enforced 
by society. There are no penalties of the future, there are 
no rewards of the future, all of life is bounded by the grave, 
all law comes from the ^vill of men, and all ethical principles 
are simply the empirical rules which these men have formed 
for their own guidance in a comfortable going through this 
present world. The only measure, therefore, of right and 
wrong in this state of society from which God has been 
abolished and religion has been abolished is what will make 
happiness. To-day there are tw^o standards, what will 
make happiness and what will make character, and the 
same thing does not always make happiness and make 
character — not by any means. But then the notion of 
living for character will be gone. There will be no char- 
acter apart from conformity to the external reaHties which 
society has framed and which society enforces. Consider 
for one moment w^hat this world would be to live in if all 



I 



A GODLESS LIFE IS A HOPELESS LIFE. 167 

the fear of the future and all the hope of the future were 
taken away, if there were no reverence for any one higher 
than king or president or prophet or parent. 

And with this expunging of great fundamental princi- 
ples from life, there will go out also from man the capacity 
to perceive them. Conscience is what? Why it is putting 
together a moral act and a moral ideal and measuring the 
act by the ideal. It is putting this moral act which you do 
alongside the eternal laws of God and seeing how it stands 
by those laws of God. But there are no longer laws of 
God, there are no longer eternal laws, there is, so far as 
we are concerned, nothing eternal. We are shut off in 
this little world, and the end of our life is for us the end 
of the world. There are no eternities, there are no eternal 
laws. Therefore conscience can do nothing but measure 
your conduct by the result to yourself, or, possibly, the 
result to your neighbor. Conscience becomes simply a 
shrewd, skilful guess as to the results of conduct. There 
is no honesty but the best policy. 

You have taken God out of the religious institutions, you 
have taken God out of the ethical laws. You will take 
God and eternal sanction out of all systems of education, 
and what will be the result there? What is the end of edu- 
cation? Go to-day to any college; listen to any baccalau- 
reate sermon, or for that matter, to any commencement 
address, and the commonplace in all the addresses is this : 
for men who do believe in God and men who do not be- 
lieve in God : The end of education is character. Men 
who believe in religion and men who do not believe in re- 
ligion are alike so impregnated with a sense of the future 
that everything in this world is made preparation for some- 
thing yet to come. The boy is educated for a later boy- 
hood ; the school is preparation for the college ; the college 
for the post-graduate course ; the post-graduate course for 



1 68 A GODLESS LIFE IS A HOPELESS LIFE. 

the professional course, the professional course for the 
professional life ; and the professional life for the further 
life that lies beyond ; all the way through man is look- 
ing forward, and whether he will or not he still looks 
forward to a point beyond the grave ; whether he knows it 
or not he is preparing for something to come, and the end 
of education, he says, is character. But now this is taken 
away. There is no forecasting. You are launched on a 
ship that has no harbor. The end of your voyage is to 
founder and go down, and, therefore, the end of education 
is to make the voyage as comfortable and pleasant as you 
can. Education under the inspiration and guidance of 
secularism has already become what the Germans call a 
"bread and butter science.'' How it makes a man's blood 
tingle sometimes with indignation to hear the discussion : 
Is a college education an advantage to a business man? 
and to hear the question discussed as though the end of 
education was to make a successful business man. As though 
the question was : If you go through college, can you make 
more money? Take God out of life, take irrimortality out 
of life, take the character that is founded on God and im- 
mortality out of life, and then education does become a 
mere bread and butter science, then we shall no longer be 
making men and women in our schools and colleges, we 
shall be making doctors or lawyers or teachers or plumbers 
or carpenters — anything but men and women — and the 
education itself will lose the very center. For what is the 
object of all education but to find in the constant trace of 
paths that run not parallel but toward a common center, 
what that center is. We study biology in order that we may 
learn how from the beginning God made the world ; we 
study astronomy to find out how the Eternal is carrying on 
the operations of his hands in other worlds than this ; we 
study history to know what is the trend and course of human 



A GODLESS LIFE IS A HOPELESS LIFE. 169 

events under the guidance of a Providence who is making 
something out of the past — we cannot tell what, nor can we 
tell how ; we study literature in order that we may under- 
stand the heart that beats behind the page, that we may 
know what love is and what hope is and what is the eternal 
life in men that throbs in them all and that makes them as 
one man. Then we shall study biology and astronomy 
only to know how the dice was thrown five hundred thou- 
sand years ago ; and history, not to know what is the trend 
and course of events, only to know how sailors disported 
themselves, how they played upon the deck, and how they 
handled the oars one hundred years ago before their boat 
went down. The very unifying end, the very object and 
aim, the very ambition of education is plucked away when 
you pluck God out of life and religion out of life. 

What will become of society? That splendid phrase 
" the brotherhood of man " has almost become, the com- 
mon cant of politician and sociologist. Why brotherhood ? 
Why am I your brother? Why is this man with a hundred 
millions brother to this truckman whom he employs ? Why 
is this college professor with his learning brother to this 
poor, ignorant man, who can neither read nor write ? Why 
are you in your comfortable home brother or sister of the 
homeless and the outcast ? You are not if you have no 
common Father. You are not fellow-citizen with a man 
who does not belong to the same country. You are not 
fellow Anglo-Saxon with a man who does not belong to the 
same race. You are not human brother to the man who is 
not of the same parentage. And you are not one of a 
brotherhood if there be no Father who binds us together. 
You might better pluck the sun out of the heavens and ex- 
pect the moons and the planets to revolve still in their 
ceaseless round harmonious with one another than to take 
God out of the universe or out of the faith of men in the 



I/O A GODLESS LIFE IS A HOPELESS LIFE. 

universe and think the faith in brotherhood will abide. It 
is bad enough as it is, this human society of ours. Even 
while deep down in our hearts, wrought into our experi- 
ence by centuries of traditions, is the belief, half held by 
all, strongly held by many, that we are the children of a 
common Father, how we fight and wrangle, how we press 
against one another and crowd one another to the wall, how 
brother cheats his brother and tramples his brother under 
foot ! Take the thought of God and with it the thought 
of human brotherhood out of life, and your streets will be 
like those narrow streets of Cairo that have no sidewalks, 
w^here a man drives his carriage as he will, and the pedestrian 
must get out of the way or be run over. There will be no 
longer left in society a place whereon men may walk; 
strong men may trample them under foot. If brotherhood 
goes away, fatherhood goes. Oh, the pitifulness of it ! 
Oh, the sorro^\iulness of it ! Life is sad enough at best; 
as grapes are trodden in the wine vats so are men oppressed 
and beaten down, yet the Christian believes that out of the 
flowing of blood and the ferment wdll issue the richness 
and the sparkle of the glory of another life. But take away 
the thought of God and there will be no other life ; then 
there will be no God who sympathizes ; then men will 
trample on their fellow-men, and the blood of the grapes will 
run off and nothing be left but the skins to curse the earth. 
Your Sunday is gone, your church is gone, your Bible is 
gone, your prayer is gone, your hopes centering on God 
and immortality have gone, your sanction of the eternal 
and immortal life is gone, the great ethical principles that 
stand as standards of human life are gone, the end and aim 
of education as character building has gone, the bond that 
held society together, and made it at least tolerable to live 
upon the earth, has gone. And what ^\dll your government 
be ? The supremacy of law. But what is law ? Law is 



A GODLESS LIFE IS A HOPELESS LIFE. 171 

either one of two things. It is either the authority that 
Hes over men, which men must find out, or it is the 
authority of the strongest over the weakest, which men do 
find out. Either there are eternal laws which men must 
obey and which men have, therefore, the power to enforce, 
or else there are no eternal laws, and might makes right. 
Whether that might is the might of a democracy or an 
aristocracy or a monarchy does not make any difference. 
It is as bad in the one case as it is in the other. I know 
there has been despotism of conscience. I know that men 
undertake as interpreters of God's law to enforce their own 
interpretations on others, by sinful methods sometimes, and 
harsh ones ; still I put the three types before you and let 
you choose. Under Nero, the will of one man enforced 
over the community; in the French Revolution, the law of 
a despotic democracy enforced over the community; in 
New England the law of despotic conscience enforced over 
the community. Will any man hesitate whether he will 
live in Puritan New England under a despotic conscience, 
or in France under a despotic democracy, or in Rome under 
a despotic Nero? But take away God and the conscious- 
ness of law that is sanctioned and centered in God, and 
you have nothing left but the despotism either of democracy 
or an individual. Preach in America until it becomes a 
national tradition, that there are no future sanctions and no 
future rewards, no God and no eternal principles of right 
and wrong ; teach this great half-educated, hirsute, greedy, 
ambitious democracy that there is nothing lying beyond 
this life and no God above to whom they must respond and 
nothing they may revere but their fellow men, and you who 
own a Httle more than the majority may as well burn the 
bonds your wealth is written on, for there would be noth- 
ing to stand between the despotic power of a democracy 
without sympathy or conscience and yourself. 



172 A GODLESS LIFE IS A HOPELESS LIFE. 

Godless is hopeless. If we let our Sundays become mere 
holidays, if we forget the message of God which our Bible 
conveys to us, if we think our church is a mere place in 
which to gather for lectures, if we lose worship out of our 
aggregate lives and worship out of our individual lives, if 
we cease to believe that there is a personal God and Father 
of us all who loves us and seeks our love, if we cease to 
seek that love and to live in personal relationship with him, 
if the school of philosophy which would take these faiths 
out of us has its way, and the tendency of thought which 
we sometimes see in America runs on to its completion, 
we shall have a government from which liberty will be gone, 
we shall have a society from which brotherhood will be 
gone, we shall have an education from which all the noble 
ends and unifying purpose will be gone, we shall have in- 
dividual lives from which all hope and comfort in time of 
sorrow and trouble will be gone. If that time were to 
come, then no longer, when you laid your beloved in the 
grave, could you look for a reunion, no longer, could you 
hope for a life beyond in which you might correct some of 
the mistakes, the errors and the follies of which you have 
been guilty here; no longer, when you struggled with 
temptations without and fears within that were too strong 
for you, could you lift clasped hands and seek help from a 
power not yourself to strengthen and make you rejoice. 
Godless is hopeless. 



WHAT IS RELIGION? 

" For now we see through a glass, darkly ; but then face to face : 
now I know in part ; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 
And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three ; but the greatest of these 
is love,^'* 

(I, Corinthians, xiii, 12, 13.) 

You look at a mirror and seem to see something on the 
other side ; it is as a window. The apostle says we see 
things in this life as one that looks through a window at 
them. But not that only ; we look at a tarnished mirror, 
and the reflections which come to us are dimmed and im- 
perfect reflections. And not that only ; we only see frag- 
mentary reflections ; we are as a child playing with a dis- 
sected map and getting now and then a state pieced 
together, while yet the United States is in fragments about 
him. Out of parts we construct our imperfect knowledge, 
says the apostle. So then our life is tarnished and imper- 
fect. That is not all ; even as things are, with our poor, 
fragmentary, broken knowledge — even as things are, we 
have faith and hope and love. 

I want to speak to you, then, this morning of the tran- 
sient and the eternal in religion ; or, of the semblance and 
the reality in rehgion ; the difference between the life and 
our knowledge of the life. We know in part, we prophesy 
in part, we see through a glass darkly ; but in spite of all 
that there remains for us life itself, and the life itself is far 
more important than anything we think about the life. 

^1i 



174 WHAT IS RELIGION? 

Religion is a life ; theology is what we think about life. 
You have heard a great many times before from this pulpit, 
under its present pastorate and under its previous pastorate, 
that religion is more important than theology, but it needs 
to be said over and over again. I wish this morning to 
illustrate and to apply it rather than to expound it. 

Religion is the life of the conscience. We have a capa- 
city of judging that there are some things right and some 
things wrong, just as we have a capacity of judging that 
there are some things beautiful and some things ugly, 
some things wise and some things unwise. Now this 
capacity to judge that some things are right and some 
things are wrong, this appreciation of the things that are 
right and distaste for and abhorrence of the things that 
are wrong, we call conscience. And religion is loyalty to 
this conscience, obedience to this conscience ; it is count- 
ing this conscience supreme; it is putting righteousness 
above beauty, above pleasure, above expediency. There 
are some persons who say that conscience is the voice of 
God in the soul of man, and others who say that it is sim- 
ply a human faculty with all the frailties and imperfec- 
tions of other human faculties. There are some again who 
say that righteousness is determined by its results. That 
is righteous which will produce the greatest happiness to 
the greatest number and that is unrighteous which will 
produce unhappiness. There are others who say that 
righteousness is determined by the command of God. He 
tells you not to steal; therefore, it is wrong to steal. 
And still others say. No, righteousness lies back of God, it 
is inherent in God Himself ; it is not wrong to steal be- 
cause God tells you you must not steal, but He tells you 
you must not steal because it is wrong to steal. And so 
men divide and discuss what is the basis of ethics and 
what is the nature of conscience, and think that they are 



WHAT IS RELIGION? 1 75 

discussing religion, but they are not. Religion is not an 
opinion what kind of a thing conscience is ; religion is not 
an opinion as to the basis of moral obligation ; religion is 
obedience to conscience. There are men and women in 
this very congregation who never have considered the 
question whether conscience is a supernatural voice of God 
in the soul of man or a natural faculty ; there are men and 
women in this very congregation who have never considered 
the problem what is the basis of ethics, whether it is the 
greatest good of the greatest number or the command of 
God or whether right and wrong are absolute and eternal 
principles, and one cannot get behind them, and yet they 
may be the most religious men and women in the congre- 
gation. Religion is not an opinion about righteousness, it 
is the practise of righteousness. A religious education is 
not education in ethics. A religious education is the train- 
ing of the religious nature. We shall not make our public 
schools any more religious than they are now by simply 
putting in text-books of ethics and trying to teach our boys 
and girls what is the nature of conscience and what are the 
foundations of moral obligation. That may be a wise thing 
to teach, it may be a foolish thing to teach, but that is not 
teaching morals. Morals are taught only when the teacher 
is left free to bring the whole play of her moral nature on 
the child, so that he will be made to abhor dishonesty and 
irreverence and wickedness and selfishness and greed and 
intemperance in every form. A religious man is not a man 
who is learned in ethical philosophy, he is a man who 
counts righteousness above all expediencies and all place 
and all ease and all comfort. He is not even a man who 
knows always what is right. It is more righteous to follow 
a misguided conscience than it is to try to follow another's 
conscience that is not misguided. Religion consists 
in the supr^n^acy of the moral sense — obeying that, even 



176 WHAT IS RELIGION? 

when that leads awry, and learning by the blunder what 
truth is. 

A religious nation is not a nation that has an established 
church, a settled ritual, an avowed creed ; a religious nation 
is a nation that has in it the supremacy of conscience, and 
when the stress and trial come, asks, not what is expedient, 
not what is profitable, not what is pleasant, but what is 
right. What kind of a war are we engaged in ? Is it a 
righteous war or an unrighteous war? That depends upon 
the motive which is inspiring us to this war. If that mo- 
tive is revenge, if our motto is " Remember the Maine ! " if 
we are inscribing on our banners what a correspondent 
writes to me from the West is inscribed on the buttons 
which men are wearing in his town '^ To hell with Spain ! " 
then it is a most unrighteous, a most ungodly, and a most 
wicked war. And if, on the other hand, we have heard the 
cry of the oppressed across our border, if we have asked 
ourselves the question. Am I my brother's keeper? if we 
have answered with stern and reluctant purpose. We are 
our brother's keeper, if we have drawn the sword only to 
set the oppressed free, and mean to sheath it as soon as the 
oppressed are set free, then it is a most righteous and a 
most holy war. For righteousness depends upon the su- 
premacy of conscience in all the phases of life. And more 
righteous than the War of Independence, which was to set 
ourselves free, more righteous than the Civil War, which 
was to set free men for whose slavery we were partly re- 
sponsible, would be a war — God grant that this may prove 
to be such — for the purpose of setting free a people for 
whom we have no other responsibiHty than the broad 
responsibility of humanity and justice. 

Religion depends not on theories ; it is the life of the 
conscience, it is obedience to the moral sense. Religion 
is the life of reverence. It is not a definition of God, it is 



WHAT IS RELIGION? 177 

not a theory about God, it is reverence toward God. Re- 
ligion begins in babyhood, when the child is not old 
enough to understand even the conception of God. Chil- 
dren, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right, says 
the apostle, this is your righteousness. Reverence begins 
with honor for father and mother, and it goes out into rev- 
erence for superior men and noble men. It is sometimes 
said that we idealize the heroes of the past. We do ; we 
ought to. We idealize our Abraham Lincoln and our 
George Washington and our Thomas Jefferson and our 
Alexander Hamilton. We forget their frailties and their 
imperfections and their vices, and we remember only their 
virtues. Woe for the nation that does not know how to 
idealize its heroes of the past and to revere them. 

And this reverence which begins with reverence of the 
child for its parents, and goes on with reverence to the 
idealized heroes of past history, reaches up to reverence 
to the Almighty and the Supreme. The evil of atheism is 
not that it is an opinion that there is no God — not that at 
all. Atheism says there is nowhere in this universe any 
one wiser or greater or better than we are. That is the evil 
of atheism ; it is concentrated self-conceit. It is irrever- 
ence j not a false philosophy of life. The evil of positivism 
is not in its philosophy. The positivism that says there is 
no God we can know anything about, we can only know 
one another, and can only worship our own idealized 
heroes of the past ; the positivism that looks in the mirror 
and bows down and worships itself is another form of self- 
conceit, another form of irreverence. 

Theology is a definition of God ; reverence is the wor- 
ship of God. Religion is not a wise, ethically correct 
definition of God ; it is reverence toward Him, not fear 
of Him. Fear repels, reverence attracts. It is looking up 
toward God, and then looking toward ourselves ; and be- 
12 



178 WHAT IS RELIGION? 

cause we have compared ourselves with the Infinite and the 
Eternal, beholding our infirmities, our weaknesses, our 
Httlenesses. The life of rehgion is the life of reverence 
and the life of humihty. That definition of God which pro- 
motes reverence is the best definition ; that which prevents 
reverence is the worst definition. If the old theology with 
its definition that God is power promotes reverence, it is a 
good theology ; if the new theology with its declaration 
that God is love is so taken or so preached as to breed a 
famiHarity that comes near to contempt, it is a bad theol- 
ogy. The value of theology depends on the life that it 
nurtures in the soul, and your religion depends, not on 
what you think about God, but what is the attitude of your 
soul toward Him. 

So religion is not the form in which reverence expresses 
itself. It is not a ritual, it is a life. From one Bible class 
in Brooklyn this spring six young men have entered the 
Church of Christ. Two of them have entered the Roman 
Catholic Church ; four of them have entered Plymouth 
Church, Protestant of Protestant churches. Which are the 
more religious? No man can tell. For the Roman Cath- 
olic who reveres God, bowing before the upraised wafer, 
has the life of reverence and is religious, and the Roman 
Catholic who sits in church and bows without reverence in 
his heart is irreligious; the Protestant who joins in the 
hymn of praise, his heart really rising to God Almighty 
while he sings, is religious ; and the Protestant whose voice 
joins in the song of praise, and who is thinking of his stocks 
or his bonds or the dress of the neighbor at his side, is irre- 
ligious. Religion is not the form in which reverence ex- 
presses itself, it is the life of reverence toward God and of 
humility toward one^s self. 

Religion is the life of faith. We look upon the things 
that are unseen and are eternal, says Paul. The life is 



WHAT IS RELIGION? 1 79 

more than meat, says Christ. This is faith — looking on 
the things that are unseen, recognizing the fact that the life 
is more than meat. It is faith which sees that love of beauty 
is worth more than a picture. It is faith which sees that 
appreciation of a poem is worth more than a book. It is 
faith which sees that the life in the house is worth more 
than the house which encloses the life. It is faith which 
sees that the invisible is eternal, and cares more for it than 
all things which encase it and which minister to it. Now, 
religion is the life of faith. Men have gone out into this 
invisible world and what they have tabulated and formu- 
lated as the results of their exploration in the invisible 
world we call creeds. 

A creed is the tabulated result of the experience of the 
invisible life of the world. Whether it is a good thing or a 
bad thing depends altogether upon the use that is made of 
it, and not upon the nature of the creed itself. Here, my 
child, is a botany. If you will study it, so that having 
learned something about flowers you want to go out into 
the field and pick a flower and analyze it for yourself, your 
botany will do you good. But if your book is given to you 
by a teacher, who says you must not go out into the field 
to gather flowers for yourself, you must not analyze them 
to find out what they are, or, if you do you must certainly 
find them to be what was told you in the book, it is bad. 
If your astronomy sends you to the stars to explore them, 
it is good ; if your astronomy forbids you to explore the 
stars for yourself, it is bad. We have looked into this spir- 
itual world, and we have said. What is our experience of 
the Infinite and the Eternal? and the answer has come 
back, Father — that is what we have found. Wliat have 
we learned of this Jesus of Nazareth from whose cradle 
sprang this whole wonderful growth that we call Christian- 
ity ? and we have answered Saviour — that is what we have 



l80 WHAT IS RELIGION? 

found. When we compare ourselves with this Jesus of 
Nazareth what do we find about ourselves ? and we have 
answered, sinner — that is what we have found. When we 
consider what this Saviour has done for us, when we con- 
sider what service He has rendered to us, how shall we ex- 
press that? and the answer has come back, Forgiveness — 
that is what we have found. And these four articles em- 
body the articles of the Christian faith : Father, Saviour, 
Sin, Forgiveness. We have elaborated it ; we have added 
definition on definition and definition on definition ; but, 
after all, the four great articles of the Christian creed are 
just those — Father, Saviour, Sin, Forgiveness. 

It is a good plan to formulate our faith, it is a good plan 
to embody it in a creed, it is a good plan to use that creed 
as a testimony to others of what we have found ; but relig- 
ion is not accepting the creed. A man may analyze the 
history of the world, and say, I am satisfied that God is a 
Father and that Jesus Christ is a Saviour, and that man is 
a sinner and there is forgiveness, and he may be the greatest 
of sinners. Religion is reverence toward the Father, love 
toward the Saviour, hate toward the sin, acceptance of the 
forgiveness. It is the life of faith, not a definition of what 
other people have found through their faith. 

Religion is the life of hope. It is not what the theolo- 
gians call eschatology ; it is not the theory of the future state ; 
it is not belief in an immortality, a resurrection, a future 
heaven and a future hell ; those beliefs may nourish religion 
or they may, as sometimes they have done, interfere with 
religion ; but religion is not that — religion is the life of hope. 
It is the spirit in man which leads him to say, I believe there 
is something better for the world than the world has yet 
come to, I believe there is something better for me than I 
have yet come to. It is the spirit which says, I am discon- 
tent with all that I have accomplished yet and all that I am 



WHAT IS RELIGION? l8l 

as yet, but because I am discontent I will press on to some- 
thing higher and better. It is the spirit which says : 

" O for a man to arise in me 
That the man that I am may cease to be." 

It is the spirit which urges a man on to a higher and nobler, 
a diviner, a more splendid manhood. It is not looking on 
the bright side of things, it is not shutting one's eyes to the 
dark side of things, it is believing that the world has some- 
thing better in store for it, and that you and I have some- 
thing better in store for us if we will press forward toward 
that ideal. 

Do you remember Cole's Voyage of Life — the four pic- 
tures? An angel watches over the cradle as it comes out 
from its mysterious cleft in the rocks. An angel hovers 
above the young man as he looks forward toward the goal 
which his imagination has constructed and toward which he 
is setting the prow of his boat. An angel looks down upon 
the struggling man in his manhood, breasting the storm and 
still having his face forward and onward. An angel floats 
above the old man in his serene old age, on the broad sea, 
out upon which he has come and from which he looks for- 
ward to the domes and the spires of the Celestial City. 
That angel is hope ; hope that bids the child look forward 
to boyhood ; hope that bids the boy arm himself for brave 
conflict in manhood ; hope that quickens the young man 
in his manhood to stand bravely and courageously for right- 
eousness and truth, because God is with righteousness and 
truth ; and hope that watches over and companions the old 
man when the hairs grow white and the hands grow feeble 
and the voice grows faint, and points him still forward to a 
larger, a diviner and a more splendid manhood in the life 
that is to come. Religion is the life of hope — always dissatis- 
fied with what has been, always expecting something better. 



1 82 WHAT IS RELIGION? 

Religion is the life of love ; most of all, of love. The life 
of pity for the unfortunate ; of pity not only for the unfor- 
tunate but for the sinful. That pity which though it turn, as 
it sometimes ought to do, the tramp away from the door with- 
out a dime, does not turn him away without sympathy felt 
and perhaps expressed, for the man who through sin has 
brought his poverty upon himself. It is the spirit which turns 
the prison into a penitentiary. It is the spirit which fires 
with zeal a Mrs. Ballington Booth and sends her to gather 
saints out of prison cells. It is the spirit of courtesy and kind- 
ness and consideration that makes gentlemen and ladies and 
forbids one, whatever his ignorance, to be a boor. It is the 
spirit that makes one put himself in his neighbor's place. 
It is the spirit that sends a George Kennan into the wilds 
of Siberia, a Jacob Reis to learn how the other half lives, a 
Wyckoff to intermingle his own life with that of the out- 
cast and the wretched. It is the spirit which is sending 
the Red Cross with our armies to Cuba. It is the spirit 
which is inspiring teachers in our mission schools, among 
all the colored population of the South, and the great band 
and army of missionaries in other lands. It is the spirit 
which utters itself sometimes in words. Wise is it to utter 
itself in words. There are men who love, and yet cannot 
somehow form the words of love, and women who give love 
and yet cannot somehow say they love. But the spirit of 
love, when its tongue is loosened, is the spirit that makes 
home sweet and sacred and joyous. Tell your mother 
sometimes, young man, that you love her ; it will do her 
good. Tell your wife sometimes, old husband, that you 
love her ; it will put new life into her heart. Tell your 
husband, bashful wife, sometimes that you love him ; a little 
coddUng now and then is relished by the strongest men. 
But after all, deeds are more than words, and the best love 
shows itself in deeds j for love that is pity to the unfortu- 



WHAT IS RELIGION? 1 83 

nate, mercy to the sinful, affection in the home, is service 
to all men everywhere. And this is religion — not what we 
think about life, but what it is in us ; for this is to follow 
Christ. We admire Him, we reverence Him, we love Him, 
not because He framed an eloquent ritual, not because He 
formulated a wonderful creed, not because He taught a new 
philosophy, but because, in the quietest, simplest, humblest, 
most natural life, He never turned aside from the straight 
path of duty, either driven by fear or attracted by interest. 
He revered his Father, and walked in a humility that was 
never self-degradation ; He lived as one that sees the in- 
visible, and men knew it ; He was radiant with hope in the 
darkest night of the world's civilization, and He loved as 
never man loved before or since. To hope, to see, to love, 
to obey, to revere, this is religion. 

Inspire us all with this life ; teach us to test and measure 
all things by this life ; help us all to live this life which 
Thou hast interpreted to us by the life of Him who is the 
Son of God. For whose sake and in whose name we ask 
it. Amen. 



THE CREED : A TESTIMONY, NOT A TEST. 

" And Philip said, ifthoti believ est with all thine hearty thou mayest. 
A7td he answered and said, I believe that Jesns Christ is the Son of 
God,'''' (Acts, via, 37.) 

This verse you will find in the old version of the New 
Testament ; you will not find it in the new or revised ver- 
sion of the New Testament. The reason you will not find 
it in the new or revised version is that the best scholars are 
of the opinion that it does not belong in the New Testa- 
ment ; and I have selected it for my text this morning, be- 
cause it does not belong in the New Testament. It has 
crept into the New Testament at a very early date ; and its 
creeping into the New Testament at a very early date illus- 
trates the corruption which has entered into the Church of 
Christ and done a great deal of damage to the Church of 
Christ. Let me read the passage, omitting this verse : 

'* And Philip opened his mouth, and beginning from this 
scripture, preached unto him Jesus. And as they went on 
their way, they came unto a certain water ; and the eunuch 
saith. Behold, here is water ; what doth hinder me to be . 
baptized? And he commanded the chariot to stand still; 
and they both went down into the water, both Philip and 
the eunuch, and he baptized him.'* 

That is the story as it appears originally in the New 
Testament. But some early scribe thought that was not 
quite safe \ here was this eunuch baptized without any evi- 

184 



THE CREED : A TESTIMONY, NOT A TEST. 1 85 

dence whatever that he had accepted the creed of the 
church. So this scribe, to guard against the danger which 
he thought might creep into the church from that omission, 
inserted the text I have read — ^' And Phihp said, If thou 
behevest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And he an- 
swered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of 
God." This is, I believe, the only instance in the New 
Testament in which a creed, even the simplest, is made a 
test of church membership ; and this instance is not in the 
New Testament. A creed is a testimony ; it never ought 
to be a test ; and the transference of the creed from being 
a testimony into a test is that corruption of which I spoke 
a moment ago, the first instance of which is found in this 
incident which constitutes the text of this morning's dis- 
course. 

Let me try and make clear the distinction between a 
testimony and a test. A Church of Christ is a body of men 
and women who are loyal to Christ as their leader ; a body 
of men and women who believe in Him, and because they 
believe in Him are His disciples, wishing to learn from 
Him ; are His followers, wishing to do His work in His 
way. As their life comes short of this ideal, they have a 
common desire to express their penitence, their regret that 
they have fallen away from it ; they have a new sense of 
penitence. They have a new sense of dependence, too; 
a new sense that they are not sufhcient for the exigencies of 
the new life on which they have entered. New desires grow 
up in them to be like this Christ, to do His work better, to 
be worthier of Him ; and so new desires arise in their 
hearts, and a new purpose animates their life. They no 
longer say, as l^aul says in the seventh t)f Romans, What 
I am doing 1 do not understand ; they do understand ; 
they mean to do Christ's work in Christ's way. Thus a new 
experience of loyalty, a new experience of dependence, a 



1 86 THE CREED : A TESTIMONY^ NOT A TEST. 

new experience of penitence, and a new experience of con- 
secration enters into their life. They wish to give expres- 
sion to this j and out of this new experience comes a hymn- 
book. The hymn-book is the expression of the emotional 
Hfe of a Christian body of men and women. 

But there grows out of this new Hfe something else than 
emotional experience; there grows a new view of life. 
They beHeve that Jesus was born in Bethlehem ; that He 
lived j that He died ; that He was crucified ; that He was 
buried ; that he rose again from the dead. And through 
this belief, as through a window, they look upon life, and 
life takes on a new meaning. They have a new under- 
standing of it j life seems to them broader, larger, deeper 
than before. And they wish to give expression to this new 
view of life. God is nearer to them. He is no longer a 
far-away God ; merely a just judge ; merely the creator of 
the universe ; He who was the father of Jesus Christ is their 
father, because they are Christ's. They have, too, a new 
view of the future ; for the eternal life, which was but a vague 
and indefinite idea before, has become clear and definite 
to them through their belief that Jesus rose from the dead. 
They are not content merely to give expression to their emo- 
tional life ; they also wish to give expression to this new 
view of life, this sense of the Fatherhood of God, of the 
divine humanity of Christ, of the splendid future of the race ; 
and out of this intellectual side of their experience grows 
the creed. The hymn-book is the expression of the emo- 
tional life of men and women who are trying to do Christ's 
work in Christ's way ; the creed is, or ought to be, the 
expression of their intellectual life — their thought-life. 

Now, no person would think of making the hymn-book 
a test of membership. No person would say. You cannot 
come into our church unless you will sing " Crown Him with 
many crowns/' or ''Souls of men ! why will you scatter? " 



THE CREED : A TESTIMONY, NOT A TEST. 187 

which we have just sung. We come to church out of vari- 
ous experiences, with various temperaments. Some have 
come with their cup running over with gladness; they 
want to express praise ; some with experiences of sorrow ; 
the seat is vacant that once was filled, and the heart is sur- 
charged with grief, and they do not want to sing of joy, 
they want to sing of comfort. Some have come with a 
sense of achievement ; they have accomplished something 
and want to sing a song of triumph. Some have come 
with a sense of failure, and want to sing a song of peni- 
tence. What sort of a church would that be which would 
say, You are not Christians, you cannot be members of this 
church unless you all sing the same praise, the same peni- 
tence, the same comfort, at the same time. Our hymn-book 
is the expression of our emotional experiences, but it is the 
expression of the varied experiences of varied Christians. 
We sing, " Crown Him with many crowns," and one who 
came with His head bowed down with sorrow listens to the 
first verse, and listens to the second verse, and sings in the 
third verse, because she has got from the glad notes of 
others a glad note herself. Our hymn-book is no test, but 
it is a testimony. 

What our hymn-book is the creed of the church ought 
to be. Not a test, but a testimony ; not something which 
men must believe, but a product of their experience and the 
common expression of it. If, indeed, one should have 
strayed into this Plymouth Church this morning and heard 
our singing and said, I do not care for any of these hymns, 
they mean nothing to me, he would not come into our 
church. Because we say, you must sing our hymns or you 
cannot come? No! but because he would not wish to 
come. If one should come into this church and say, let me 
see your year-book, I do not care for your kindergartens, I 
do not care for your Sunday-schools, I do not care for your 



1 88 THE CREED : A TESTIMONY, NOT A TEST. 

boys' clubs, I do not care for your missionary associations, 
I do not care for all this work, it is nothing to me, we 
would not exclude him because he did not believe in kin- 
dergartens or Sunday-schools or boys' clubs or missionary 
associations ; he would exclude himself because he does not 
care about the work we are engaged in. And if he should 
say, I do not believe in God as the Father of the human 
race, nor in Jesus Christ as the Saviour of men, we would 
not exclude him because he does not believe in our creed ; 
he would stay out because he sympathizes neither with our 
emotional life, nor with our active life, nor with our intellect- 
ual life. But to make the creed a test is as incongruous 
as to make the h}Tnn-book a test. 

The creed never was made a test in New Testament 
times. The verse which I have read this morning is, I 
think, though I always hesitate to affirm a negative, the 
only verse that indicates any kind of creed test applied to 
the question, May I join Christ's church? The test is al- 
w^ays different. It is always a practical test ; never a test 
of feeling, never a test of thinking ; always a test of doing. 
Christ comes to Peter, James and John, at their nets, and || < 
says. Follow thou me ; and they leave their nets and follow 
Him. He comes to Matthew, sitting at the receipt of cus- 
toms, and says, Follow thou me ; Matthew leaves his table 
and follows Christ. Christ does not say, What do you 
think? The test is a test of active work, of service, of 
loyalt}^, of following. The rich young ruler comes to Him 
and kneels down before Him, so full is he of emotion, and 
addresses Him Good Master, recognizing His authority, 
but when Christ says. Go sell all that thou hast and follow 
me and you shall have treasure in Heaven, the young man 
goes away sorrowful. The test is action, not feeling ; not 
thinking, but doing. Christ meets Paul on the road to 
Damascus. Paul says, ^\^lat wilt thou have me to do? 



THE CREED : A TESTIMONY, NOT A TEST. 1 89 

Christ does not say, Do you believe? nor, Do you feel? 
Christ says, Go into Damascus and it shall be told you what 
you shall do. The jailer at Philippi startled by the earth- 
quake, comes, falls down before Paul and Silas, and says. 
What shall I do to be saved? Believe on the Lord Jesus 
Christ and thou shalt be saved. Then He takes them out of 
prison, washes their stripes, ministers to them, runs the 
risk of losing his life by the service he renders to them, and 
is baptized. He is not asked to subscribe to any creed ; 
he is not asked what he thinks or how he feels. He has 
done something because of his new life, that is the best 
testimony. War has broken out ; a recruiting sergeant ad- 
dresses a group of young men. Are you patriotic young 
men; will you serve the country? One young man says, I 
am patriotic, I will join in singing the Star Spangled Banner. 
The sergeant replies, I am not looking for men to sing ; I 
am looking for men to fight. Another man says, I am pa- 
triotic, I believe this is a just war, a necessary war. The ser- 
geant replies, I am not asking what men think about the war. 
I want to know whether you will enlist ; that is the one ques- 
tion. And the one question which Jesus Christ addresses to 
men is not. What do you think, nor, How do you feel ; it is 
this ; Will you enlist ? 

The creed ought to be simply the common testimony of 
the church and the church has made it a test ; it ought to 
be an open door at which we should come and stand and 
say, Whosoever will, let him come ; and we have made it a 
sentinel guarded gate, and have said no man can come in 
unless he knows the password. And the result of this has 
been a false test. There are thousands outside the Church 
of Christ that ought to be inside, and hundreds inside the 
church that ought to be outside, and it is rather difficult to 
say which would do the most good — to have the thousands 
come in or the hundreds go out ; for the false test has shut 



190 THE CREED : A TESTIMONY, NOT A TEST. 

out thousands of men and women who would answer to the 
test which Christ Himself prescribes. They are following 
Him ; they are going about doing good ; they are feeding 
the hungry, clothing the naked, ministering to the sick, 
visiting the imprisoned; they have the spirit of Christ; 
but they are too conscientious to say that they believe in 
the creed, and so they stay outside. And, on the other 
hand, there are not a few in the Church of Christ who are 
orthodox in doctrine and not in practise ; who can subscribe 
to all the creed, but who give no hour of time to Christ's serv- 
ice, and very little money to Christ's treasury, and show 
very Httle of Christ's spirit in life. The creed is the test 
by which they have been measured by the church, and the 
creed is the test by which they have measured themselves. 

The creed as a test includes those who ought to be ex- 
cluded and excludes those who ought to be included. 
" Suffer little children to come unto me and forbid them 
not, for of such is the kingdom of Heaven." Imagine 
Christ standing at the door of the church, on one side, say- 
ing that, and the officers of the church standing at the door 
of the church on the other side, and saying to the children 
coming out of the Sunday-school, You cannot come in 
unless you believe in metaphysical statements of doctrine 
which the theologians themselves do not understand ! 

Making the creed a test instead of a testimony has 
created divisions in the church ; for the creed has not only 
been made a test, but articles have been added to it for the 
purpose of making the test more exclusive. So we have to- 
day denominations separated, not by their creeds ; by the 
subordinate articles in their creeds. They will all say : We 
believe in the Bible ; in God the Father ; in Christ the 
Divine Saviour ; in future punishment ; but they add. We 
do not define the relationship of Christ to the Father in the 
same way, and we do not believe that the nature of the 



THE CREED : A TESTIMONY, NOT A TEST. IQI 

punishment will be the same ; we do not think that baptism 
should be administered to children, only to adults, or we 
do not think it should be administered to adults only, but 
also to children. And so we have tacked on minor arti- 
cles, making each one an exclusion. Suppose a man should 
come to us and say, I want to join Plymouth Church, and 
we should say to him. Do you believe in the kindergarten? 
kNo, I do not. I think little children should be taught in 
the nursery. Then you cannot join Plymouth Church, we 
believe in kindergartens. And another man says, I would 
like to join your church. Do you believe in boys' clubs ? 
No, I do not. Then you cannot join us, because we be- 
lieve in boys* clubs. But this would not be so absurd as it 
is to say, You cannot come into this church unless you be- 
lieve that only adults should be baptized, or if you do not 
believe that infants can be baptized. The church has been 
broken up into fragments, not by making long creeds, but 
by having creeds and by making the creed the test of mem- 
bership. 

But I am inclined to think that the greatest evil of all 
which has come into the Church of Christ in these latter 
days by supposing the creed to be a test of membership, 
has been the reaction in many quarters against any creed, 
and the result an emotional, emasculated, invertebrate 
church that does not know what it thinks, that does not 
think anything, that has not any testimony to give, that has 
no commonalty of faith, that is simply an emotional body. 
The Church of Christ ought to know what it thinks. It is 
a testifying body ; it ought to have a testimony to give ; 
but the testimony which it gives ought not to be the test of 
membership in the body. The children of this world are 
wiser than the children of light. If political parties acted 
with as much folly as the churches, to bring a concrete il- 
lustration to bear on our topic, it is very doul)tful whether 



192 THE CREED : A TESTIMONY, NOT A TEST. 

President McKinley would be the President of the United 
States. If the RepubHcan part)^ had said to ever)- man 
who wanted to vote for Mr. McKinley, You cannot vote for 
him unless you believe in a high protective tariff, and the 
fact that you do not believe in free silver is not enough ; it 
is at least questionable w^hether he would have had votes 
enough to elect him. We do not act in that way in poli- 
tics j if the man will work with us, we welcome him. If 
the man will work with the Church of Christ, we should 
welcome him ; and we should no more require that a man 
subscribe to every article of faith in the creed, than we re- 
quire that he should sing every hymn in the hymn-book. 

The Church of Christ has a creed. This oldest creed is 
one which grew up gradually. Testimony after testimony 
was uttered by the church, and these testimonies flowed 
together, until at last, after a lapse of three or four centuries, 
they grew into this confession of faith : 

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven 
and earth. And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord ; 
who was conceived by the Holy Ghost ; bom of the Virgin 
Mary; suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead, 
and buried. He descended into hell ; the third day He rose 
from the dead ; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on 
the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From thence 
He shall come to judge the quick and the dead. 

I beUeve in the Holy Ghost ; the holy Catholic Church ; 
the Communion of Saints; the forgiveness of sins ; the 
Resurection of the body ; and the Life everlasting. 

Plymouth Church is an independent church. It values 
its liberty too much to barter it away for any supposed 
ecclesiastical advantage arising from organic imion and sub- 
jection to external authority. But I venture, speaking for 
Plymouth Church this morning, as well as to Plymouth 
Church, to affirm that this common creed of the Christian 
Church is our testimony also, though not our test. It does 



THE CREED : A TESTIMONY, NOT A TEST. I93 

not stand at the door ; it does not exclude any man or 
any child j we require no subscription to this nor to any 
other statement of belief ; we should as soon think of re- 
quiring subscription to a hymn-book or a prayer. But it 
is the expression of our faith. We beHeve that the Creator of 
the heavens and the earth stands in personal relation to 
every one of us, as a father to his child. We believe that 
His Son has come into the world, and has lived, and 
suffered, and died, and risen from the dead, that He may 
give us a new conception of God, and a new teaching of 
what humanity ought to be. We believe that the Spirit of 
God broods the hearts of the children of men, comforts 
them in their sorrow, illuminates them in their ignorance, 
leads them in their perplexity, lifts them out of their trouble 
and their downfall. We believe in the Church of Christ as 
the body in which the Spirit of God dwells and through 
which it is manifested ; in the communion of saints, the 
fellowship that is deeper and broader and larger and richer 
than any communion of statehood or of country. We be- 
lieve in a God who forgives sins, and cleanses the unclean, 
and purifies the impure, and strengthens the weak and 
uplifts the fallen. We believe in this life as the mere pre- 
cursor and opening to life, the mere bud that will blossom 
out into an unknown eternity. We believe in the resurrec- 
tion of each individual soul. We believe in his continued 
personality. We believe, therefore, in the recognition of 
friends and the continuance of earthly friendships, and loves 
beyond the grave. And it is because we believe in this 
Christ, and this Father, whom He hath revealed, and this 
forgiveness of sins which He has brought, and this Spirit 
of God which dwells among men, and this spirit of Christ 
which is to abide upon the earth, this Gospel and this 
future life to each individual soul, it is because of this our 
common faith, that we are joined together in this brother- 
's 



194 THE CREED : A TESTIMONY, NOT A TEST. 

hood. Were it not that it might seem a sensational and 
dramatic episode on this opening Sunday, I should be in- 
clined to ask you to rise and join with me in repeating this 
faith of the Christian Church. It is mine, it is yours. Our 
hymn-book contains hymns from the Roman Cathohc 
Faber and Newman; the Unitarian Holmes and Long- 
fellow ; the Quaker Whittier ; the Calvinistic Toplady j 
the Arminian Wesley. We are one with them all in our 
song. And we are one with all Christ's people of every 
name and speech, in our faith in God the Father, Christ 
His Son, the Spirit, the Sanctifier and Comforter, the for- 
giveness of sins, the universal church, the human fellow- 
ship, the eternal life. One faith and one song unite us 
with all Christians everywhere — Unitarian and orthodox, 
Quaker and Episcopalian, Roman Catholic and Protestant. 
From our different churches, creeds and songs go up a 
little way in different dialects, but they have not gone far 
before they mingle in one great song and one great con- 
fession before the throne of God. 



' J 



"THE DOOR OF OPPORTUNITY. 

*•*' And he gave some^ apostles ; and some^ prophets ; and some^ evange- 
lists ; and some^ pastors and teachers ; for the perfecting of the saints, 
for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ : till 
we all come in the unity of the faith, a7td of the knowledge of the Soft 
of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the ful- 
ness of Christy — Ephesians, iv. 11-13. 

In these words Paul describes the functions of the Chris- 
tian Church. It is to make perfect men and women ; and 
to make them perfect after a particular type of manhood 
that is afforded by the life and character of Jesus of Nazareth. 

We are coming back from our summer vacations ; we 
are entering afresh upon our church work ; what do we 
propose to ourselves, this fall and winter, in Plymouth 
Church? Why are we a church? what are we going to do 
in and through this church, at the Mayflower, at the Bethel, 
in the Sunday-school, and in this church service, and the 
various auxiliary organizations that are connected with it? 
We have come here at a time when the public mind is 
greatly interested with new and important questions. We 
are on the eve of an important State campaign, and we 
have very earnest desires that some one in particular shall 
be elected Governor of the State — ])erhaps wc should not 
all agree who that some one in particular should be. We 
are on the eve of a National campaign, and the (juestion 
what shall be our currency will be indirectly, if not directly, 



196 *'THE DOOR OF OPPORTUNITY." 

affected by the election. We have entered into negotia- 
tions with the sister State of Canada to secure a better un- 
derstanding and better relations with her. The question 
presses upon us, what is our duty toward far-distant peoples, 
toward whom we had no recognized duty when this con- 
gregation separated last spring? what are our duties toward 
the people of Cuba, of Porto Rico, and of the Philippines? 
It is not strange that, with these discussions pressing upon 
us, these discussions filling the public press, these discus- 
sions really important in their relations to our State and 
National welfare, it is not strange if in our church gather- 
ings these shall seem to be the pre-eminent questions. And 
this is the more natural because they have relation to our 
church life, and to religious truth. The question, for ex- 
ample, what shall be the legislation of this State respecting 
the liquor traffic, is involved in the coming campaign, and 
certainly that is a question to be decided not merely by 
considerations of political expediency, but by ethical and 
moral considerations. The question of the currency is a 
question which touches very closely honesty, and must be 
governed by ethical principles. The question of our rela- 
tions to foreign peoples is a question of human brother- 
hood ; and whether we shall have no relations, or whether 
we shall have the relations of a protecting people endeav- 
oring to promote liberty, justice and equal rights, or whether 
we shall have the relations of a great, strong people trying 
to use weaker people for our own advantages, is pre-emi- 
nently an ethical question. 

Nevertheless, though I do not disregard these questions, 
nor minimize them, nor put them in the background, though 
I am, perhaps, as much interested in them as any man or 
woman in this house, though I hope to take my share as a 
citizen of the United States in endeavoring to reach some 
just and right conclusion upon them, nevertheless, these are 



''THE DOOR OF opportunity/* I97 

not the most pre-eminent questions of our life. It is im- 
portant to make good laws, it is important to make pure 
States, but it is more important to make good men and 
good women ; and the function of the church is only in- 
directly to secure good laws, to make good cities, to make 
good States ; it is primarily to make good men and good 
women. 

I say this is the pre-eminent question — because all or- 
ganizations exist for individuals, the individuals do not exist 
for the organization. The church exists that it may make 
holy men and holy women ; and, if it fails in this, nothing 
it can do, no creed to which it can subscribe, no ritual 
which it can utter, no cathedral which it can construct, no 
benevolences in which it can engage, count for anything. 
" Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, 
though I give my body to be burned, though I furnish my 
goods to feed the poor, if I have not love, it profiteth noth- 
ing.'^ The development of the individual character is the 
end of all organization. What is the State for? What is 
the difference between a good State and a bad State? 
What, if I may use the comparison without unduly appeal- 
ing to your American prejudice, what is the difference be- 
tween Spain and America, and why is the one State better 
than the other? Not because the one has a stronger navy, 
or can shoot its guns better, or has a braver army, but l)e- 
cause the one, by its public school system and its free re- 
ligion, makes good, true, honest individual men and women, 
and the other fails. The end and object of states, as the 
end and ol)jcct of the church, is to make good men and 
women. That is the end and object of law. " A good law," 
says Mr. Gladstone, *' is a law that makes virtue easy and 
vice difficult." That is the test of legislation. The end of 
all organism is the individual. 

On the other hand, it is impossible to have a good 



198 ''THE DOOR OF OPPORTUNITY/' 

organism except by means of individuals. In vain you re- 
form your ritual, in vain you recast your creed, in vain 
you rectify your political platforms, in vain you reform 
your industrial organizations, in vain you pass the politi- 
cal power from one party to another party, like the shut- 
tlecock between the battledores — in vain all this unless 
the men and women of the state, and of the church, are 
pure, true, good, honest. You cannot make a sound ship 
with rotten timber, and you cannot make a sound state with 
corrupt men. We abolish feudalism, we abolish slavery. 
Do it, and leave the old covetousness in the hearts of men 
who work and men who employ labor, and the old evil will 
appear in a new form, under free competition. Sweep one 
party out of power and put another party in power, and leave 
the old corruption in, and you will have a new ring in place 
of the old ring, and a new corruption in place of the old 
corruption ; the blood poisoning will remain, and it does 
not make much difference what we call the microbe. In- 
dividual character is the essential thing. There is some- 
thing more to be done than to reform municipal govern- 
ments, to reform state governments, to adopt policies — it is 
to make good men and women. 

Moses has told us how to make a good state. 

" Moreover, thou shall provide out of all the people, able 
men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness ; 
and place such over them to be rulers of thousands^ and 
rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens : 
And let them judge the people at all seasons.'' 

We cannot do that unless we have the able men, who 
are men of truth, who fear God, who hate covetousness ; 
we cannot do that unless the men who are to elect our 
officers are men of truth, men who fear God, men who 
hate covetousness. 



" THE DOOR OF OPPORTUNITY.'* I99 

Paul has told us what is the true solution of the indus- 
trial problem. 

" Servants, obey in all things your masters, according 
to the flesh ; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers, but 
with singleness of heart, pleasing God; and whatsoever 
you do, do it heartily to the Lord, and not unto men. 
Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and 
equal, knowing that you also have a Master in hea^^en.*' 

There is not an industrial problem that is not rooted in 
this ; that does not depend on servants who are serving 
not with eye-service. You who are masters know that ; 
you who are mistresses know that. You want clerks in 
your store and servants in your kitchen, who do not seek 
simply to satisfy your eye, and who require your watchful 
care, but who have a conscience that directs and a sense 
of responsibihty to themselves and to their God. And, on 
the other hand, no servants, no employees, can ever secure 
their just and equal rights until employers come to recog- 
nize the other half of this prescription — Masters, give unto 
your servants — not that which is the least you can give, 
the least you can get the service rendered for, the least 
possible wage, but that which is just and equal. We must 
have just and noble men, and God-fearing men, for em- 
ployers and for employed. Then the industrial problem is 
solved, and not before. 

This is specifically the function of the church. It is not 
to make new laws or new states ; it is not to enforce the 
laws that already exist ; it is to make new men and new 
women. I honor the clergy. I think it would be diffi- 
cult to find in any group gathered from any profession, a 
higher average of intelligence, of courage, of honor, than 
you will find in the clergy of America ; but when the clergy 
make laws they do not do any better than other folk. We 



200 '*THE DOOR OF OPPORTUNITY. 

are not experts in legislation ; we are not experts in ques- 
tions of political policy. I have my opinion respecting the 
Philippines, and I shall utter it, but probably not from this 
pulpit, unless it be on Thanksgiving Day. But we min- 
isters know no more about those National problems than 
the men in the pews, and often not so much. This is not 
the function of the ministry ; this is not the function of the 
church ; the specific, divine function of the church is to 
make right men and right women. 

This is what the Sabbath is given to us for. It is given 
to us that we may drop for a little while the questions 
which are perplexing us in the house, in the office, and in 
the market-place, and may come face to face with the 
larger, grander, diviner problem how to make men and 
women. The objection to the Sunday newspaper is not 
that it makes Sunday work. It does not. The work on 
the Sunday newspaper is done on Saturday ; it is the Mon- 
day newspaper that makes Sunday work. It is not neces- 
sarily irreligious reading; it may be. or it may not be, that 
depends on the editors. It is this : That the Sunday news- 
paper sweeps into the Sunday the whole current of the 
week-day life, which, for the time we should drop out of 
our thoughts, that we may give our whole attention to the 
larger, diviner and more fundamental problem, how shall 
men and women become God-fearing, honesty-loving, 
covetous-hating men and women. This is what the Bible 
is given to us for. Not as threads out of which to weave 
on the loom a philosophy, a creed ; not to tell us how old 
the world is, or how old the human race is ; not to tell us 
whether sin came into the world through one mode or 
another mode. Paul has told us very clearly what the 
Bible is for. 

" All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is 
profitable for doctrine [that is, teaching], for reproof, for 



^'THE DOOR OF OPPORTUNITY/* 201 

correction, for instruction in righteousness : That the man 
of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good 
works.'' 

That is what the Bible is given for. To show men they 
have gone wrong — that is reproof ; to show them how to 
get right — that is correction ; to instruct them in the path 
of right-going — that is instruction in righteousness. It is 
given to make men and women. 

This is what the ministry is for, and the church service. 
It is to breed such an atmosphere, to inspire such a spirit, 
that when men and women shall come into the church, be- 
fore as yet the minister has uttered a word, they shall be- 
gin to feel the change, as one feels the change when he 
rises from the miasmatic valley to the mountain heights 
above. It is to make such an atmosphere in the church 
that those who have come in sorrowing shall find God 
wiping away the tears from their eyes, and those who have 
come in distraught and discouraged shall begin to lift up 
their heads, and let the Hght of heaven shine upon them, 
and those who have come in careless and indifferent, and 
thinking that the earth is nothing but a place for making 
money, shall begin to see that there is some nobler end 
and feel some divine aspiration, and shall go forth, — the 
tempted, the discouraged, the self-conceited, to get the 
one comfort, and the other courage, and the other hu- 
mility, from the life and the character and the spirit of the 
Christ, manifested in the aspirations and prayers and 
praises of His followers. 

It is for this the Christ is given us ; it is for this the 
story of His life is written in these Four Gospels ; that we 
may see what manhood is, that we may understand what a 
right man and a right woman are. It is for this He gives 
us a gospel of the forgiveness of sins, that we may disen- 
tangle the feet that are in the mire, that we may heal the 



202 ''THE DOOR OF OPPORTUNITY.'* 

sick, that we may give sight to the blind. Every Christian 
congregation is a pool of Bethesda. All that gather here 
are somehow lame and halt and blind and diseased, and 
those most of all lame or halt or blind or diseased who 
know it not. And still the Master is here, and still he says, 
Wilt thou be made whole? and still with every benediction 
he bids you rise, take up your bed and go forth \vith a 
larger strength and a more splendid sense of duty. It is 
for this he gives his church power on earth to forgive sins ; 
it is for this he gives us the gospel of power, that we may 
make connection between the individual heart of man and 
the heart of God and put into the tempted the song, ^^ I can 
do all things through him that strengthened me." 

Other than ministers have this work to do. The mer- 
chant is so to carry on his business that his clerks will be 
better men ; the woman is so to carry on her household 
that the servants will be better women ; the statesman is so to 
administer in politics that every utterance of his shall ap- 
peal to the higher sentiment ; the journalist is not to forget 
individual men and women in his journalism, and is to use 
the newspaper to lift men up, not to drag men down ; the 
mother is to minister not to a household only but a home, 
and make not only meals but hfe. But the one institution 
which exists for this and nothing else, the one institution 
which may center all its energies and all its life on this one 
object — to make men and women, is the Christian Church. 
For that it was organized ; for that it exists. 

It is to this work, then, I call you and I call myself this 
fall as we take up our work — to make men and women like 
Christ ; who shall meet temptation as he met his tempta- 
tion in the wilderness ; who shall carry the spirit of help- 
fulness into society as he carried the spirit of helpfulness 
into the wedding at Cana ; who shall face the opprobrium 
of right doing as he faced the howling mob at Nazareth ; 



'' THE DOOR OF OPPORTUNITY. 203 

who shall dare vested interests when they are vested 
wrongs as he dared the Pharisees in the Temple ; who shall 
carry comfort and consolation into every home where sor- 
row has gone, as he carried them to the sorrow-stricken 
house in Bethany ; who shall be able to say to the sinful 
and the outcast God forgives you; who shall love and 
serve ; who shall rejoice with those who rejoice and weep 
with those who weep ; and who, when death comes, shall 
look through the grave to the land which lies beyond, shall 
see the angels where others see but the dead, and know 
that the living is not to be sought in the tomb. As long as 
the Christian church does this work, as long as it promotes 
this higher life in men and women, so long the world will 
need it, so long mankind will come for it. The anaemic 
village in New England, from which the life-blood has 
been flowing away, the red corpuscles of its blood all gone, 
leaving it pale and gaunt and half alive, needs, not a new 
school, not a new law, but a new life-blood that only the 
church and the Christian ministry can put into it. This is 
what is needed in the fevered town in the far West, where 
the men run eagerly to and fro seeking they know not 
what, driven by the fire in their bones — it needs a peace 
of God that passeth all understanding, that shall calm 
and quiet and give stability. This is what our cities, 
poisoned with political and commercial corruption, need ; 
not a change of administration, not a transfer from one 
ring to another ring, and one machine to another machine, 
whether the machine be Democratic, Republican or Inde- 
pendent ; what they need is a new life-blood of honesty, a 
new life-blood of God-fearing and God-loving and God- 
serving that shall sweep all the poisonous corruption from tlie 
city's sewers out and leave the city cleansed and jnirified. 
This is to be your work in the vSunday-school this afternoon 
and these coming Sunday afternoons. 



204 ''THE DOOR OF OPPORTUNITY/* 

If you could have been with God m the first creative 
days, and He had said to you, I will give you power to make 
the flower, would it not have been strange ? If He had said, 
you may say, Light be, and Hght shall come and bring day 
with it, would you not have gladly used this divine power. 
If He had said, You may speak, and the waters shall separate 
into the waters above the firmament and the waters below 
the firmament, and the mountains shall lift their brows 
out of the ocean at your command, would you not rejoice 
in this creative strength given to you? But He has done 
more than that. He has said to you, Sunday-school teacher, 
He has said to me as a minister. You, poor as you are, weak 
as you are, incompetent as you are, you may make men. 
The flowers shall fade, the clouds shall disappear, the very 
mountains shall crumble, and the waters shall be dried up, 
and the very earth itself shall be consumed with fervent 
heat, but man, the man you have made and I have made, 
he shall live on as long as God himself shall live. You and 
I may help to make men. 

I do not Hke the phrase "revival of religion.*' It con- 
notes machinery and sensuous excitement, and prayers for 
the sake of praying, and songs for the sake of singing ; but 
never since I have been in Brooklyn, and never, I think, 
since the period of the Civil War, did this nation so much 
need a revival of religion as it needs to-day. Not of the 
religion that is content with words of prayer and praise 
chiefly, not with religion that takes hold of men with 
a transient excitement which disappears when the meeting 
closes, but a revival of religion that means honest men and 
pure women and noble society, a revival of religion that 
means faith and hope and love — the faith that sees, the 
hope that purposes and the love that achieves. And com- 
ing back from my vacation, and looking into your faces, 
Sunday-school teachers, officers of this church, members 



*'THE DOOR OF OPPORTUNITY." 20$ 

of this church, I beseech you, as I beseech myself, that we 
may work together this fall and winter heartily, sincerely, 
earnestly and prayerfully for such a revival of religion as 
shall make men and women of the stature of Jesus Christ. 

Make so clear before us, O God, the door of opportunity, 
so clear to us the path of duty, so apparent the crown of 
glory, that we, entering in through the opportunity, and 
walkmg laboriously yet ever faithfully in the path of duty, 
may at last receive as Thy free gift the crown of righteous- 
ness, which is the crown of glory. Through Jesus Christ 
our Lord. Amen. 



"OUR LEADER." 

«< * * * hecause as he is^ so are we in this worldP (i.John^ iv, 17.) 

This might mean that the condition of the Christian is 
like the condition of the Christ. It might mean — He suf- 
fered persecution, you are to suffer persecution. It might 
be equivalent to Christ's saying : '^ If they will not hear my 
word, neither will they hear yours ; the servant is not above 
the master." But it is very clear from the context that it 
does not mean that. John is asking respecting the nature of 
God and the nature of man, as God's child. "God," he 
says, " is love ; and every one that dwelleth in love, dwelleth 
in God, and God dwells in him ; and in this thought that 
God dwells in him is the love made perfect, and because 
God dwells in him and love is made perfect he has bold- 
ness in the day of judgment, he has no fear of the future." 
And then he adds : " because as He is, so are we in this 
world." 

How that strikes at the root of one of the most common 
heresies in life! the heresy that the object of religion is to 
prepare men mainly for another world by something out- 
side their own character, not to prepare them primarily for 
this. How it strikes at the root of all notions that a man 
can live any kind of life he pleases, and then be trans- 
ported by a kind of miraculous transference to a celestial 
city at the last through a form or a ceremony 1 " As he is, 
so are we in this world." How it strikes at the root of 

206 



"OUR leader/' 207 

that other heresy, that a Christ life is an impossible life, or 
an impracticable life, or, at least, that it is not put before us 
as a possible and practicable life ; that it is divine and we 
are human, and we cannot be expected to live a divine 
life j that it lies as an ideal toward which we are to tend 
and into which by and by in the long process of ages 
humanity will come! No; "as he is, so are we in this 
world." John states it as though it were an actual histori- 
cal fact — something accomplished. So clear to him is this 
ideal a practicable ideal, so clear to him is it that this is the 
life that we are to live, can live, may live, that he speaks 
as though we already were living in it. " As he is, so are 
we in this world.'* Of course, none of us will think it 
means that we are to be as He was in the details of His life. 
He wore long, flowing robes. We do not think we must 
wear long, flowing robes to be His followers. He talked 
Aramaic. We do not think a man must talk Aramaic to be 
a Christian. He was not married. Most of us probably 
think a Christian may be married. He was not a voting 
citizen in a free republic. None of us in this congregation 
thinks a Christian must refuse to vote because he is a 
Christian. He was an itinerant minister. We do not sup- 
pose that you must all abandon your business, and I my 
stationary pulpit, and set ourselves to do the work of itin- 
erant ministry. We must go deeper than this ; we must 
understand the Christ better than this, if we are to under- 
stand what is meant by the declaration " As he is, so are we 
in this world." 

What was He in this world ? I think, if we take up the 
Four Gospels and read them, we shall see, first of all, that 
this Jesus Christ was not in the worki to do His own will. 
He did not have a will of His own, from which He deviated 
now and then to do another's will ; He was all his life long 
doing that other's will. He had a strong will, a firm will, 



208 '' OUR LEADER.*' 

a resolute will, an inflexible will. No week-kneed, vacillat- 
ing, invertebrate man was he. And this strong, resolute 
will of His was set to do the will of another ; as the strong 
will of a captain is set to the will of his commander-in- 
chief. *^I have come," He said, ^^not to do my own will, 
but the will of my Father, which is in heaven." When He 
did not know what His Father's will was He waited for it to 
declare itself. Again and again He was urged to do this or 
that, and He replied, " No, my hour has not yet come, the 
Father has not given me my command, I will not yet." 
Sometimes He was in perplexity as to what that will was. 
Once in the beginning of His life He went into the wilder- 
ness and stayed there forty days, fasting, praying that He 
might find out what was the purpose for which His Father 
had sent Him into the world. Once, at least, He dreaded 
lest He should fail to do His Father's will. It was the one 
time in His life when a great agony pressed upon Him with 
awful torture, and He wrestled in the garden in Gethsemane 
with prayers that could not be uttered lest He should fail 
to do His Father's will, lest He should break down in the 
one great, supreme moment of His life. He came out 
strengthened to drink the cup. All His life long it was the 
one set purpose, the one guiding star, the one controlling 
rule that He might do the will of His Father which was in 
heaven. 

And I think, if we look a little further in the Four Gos- 
pels, we shall find out also what it was that He understood 
to be His Father's will. It was that He might establish a 
new social order on the earth — what He called the kingdom 
of heaven or the kingdom of God. He made His disciples 
pray — " Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as 
it is in heaven.'* His very earliest preaching was "the 
kingdom of God is at hand.'* The first sermon of which 
we have any full report was a setting forth of the principles 



'' OUR leader/' 209 

of the new kingdom of God which He had come to establish 
on the earth. His second great sermon — a series of par- 
ables by the seashore — all relate to this kingdom of God, 
how it would grow up, what were its obstacles, what was 
the spirit and the power that would animate and control it. 
When He sent His twelve out on their errand, He told 
them to go, preaching '^ the kingdom of God is at hand." 
When He came to stand before Pilate and Pilate said. Art 
thou a king ? He said, I am, thou sayest truly, for this very 
purpose was I born, and for this very purpose came I into 
the world. Not more clear is it that Caesar thought to 
establish a kingdom of which he should be the head, that 
Kossuth thought to liberate Hungary, that Washington 
believed that he might establish a new free nation on this 
side of the Atlantic Ocean than that Jesus Christ lived and 
suffered and died that He might bring a new organic life 
upon the world. Sometimes He called it the kingdom of 
heaven, because it was the kingdom with which He was 
familiar. It was a kingdom of the celestial sphere; a 
kingdom of love and service, which is the law of heaven. 
And sometimes He called it the kingdom of God, because 
it was a kingdom in which all men's wills would be set, as 
His will was set, to do the will of the Father in heaven; in 
which the world would not be made up of many men with 
many minds and many purposes and many conflicting wills 
contending one with another, but in which the world would 
be made up with all men having one will, to do the will of 
the Father which is in heaven. This Christ was no mere 
good-natured philanthropist, travehng about from place to 
place, doing good as it was convenient, healing here a few 
sick, feeding there a few hungry, teaching a few ignorant. 
These were the incidents of Ilis life. He came into the 
world to do His Father's will, and He understood that the 
Father's will was the establishment of a kingdom that 
14 



2IO '' OUR LEADER." 

might be called the kingdom of heaven. Since it centers 
around God as the planets center around the sun, that might 
be called the kingdom of God. To this end He devoted 
Himself with absolute singleness of purpose. 

Much is said about self-sacrifice. What do we mean? 
As I read the story of Christ's life, I do not find the story 
of a man who wanted Power, and whenever Power knocked 
at the door had to turn away j who wanted Pleasure, and 
whenever Pleasure unrolled its pictures before him had to 
turn away again. I find the story of one who had a set, 
definite purpose in life, and when that one set, definite 
purpose was made, all things that stood in the way of it, all 
things that impeded it slipped away from him. As the 
leaves of the blossoms drop when the fruit is come, as the 
boy casts off the boyhood clothing when he emerges into 
manhood, as the child forgets his primer when he learns to 
read the book, so these lower things he cared not for, be- 
cause he cared for another and a higher, and a grander 
thing. At the close of the Civil War General Armstrong 
found a lot of negroes, ignorant, besotted, poor, lazy, idle 
good-for-naughts, gathered in his camp at Hampton, and 
he said, I will set myself to work to see what can be done 
for them — and he did ; and for twenty-five years or more 
thereafter he traveled about the country, raising for their 
education from twenty-five to fifty thousand dollars. I do 
not believe there is a man in this congregation who has 
worked as hard to make money as General Armstrong has 
worked to make money, and he never took a cent of it. The 
money went for the maintenance of that school and the 
carrying on of that work. I have seen him myself, at sup- 
per table, so interested in his topic of the negro that he 
forgot to eat, and his neighbor had to call his attention to 
the fact that he had food before him ; and yet it was 
General Armstrong who once said in my hearing, ^^ I never 



J 



'' OUR LEADER. 211 

knew what self-sacrifice is." Because he had settled it 
once for all ; he had put the purpose before him, and 
having put the purpose before him, all things centered 
on the accomplishment of that one purpose. When, 
last June, you said. We will go into the country, and 
you closed your roomy house, where you could roam about 
as you pleased, and went to a boarding house and shut 
yourself up in one or two rooms to live in a trunk, you did 
it because you deliberately chose to take the little rooms 
for the larger benefit coming from the summer vacation ; 
and you did not complain because your trunk was not a 
closet, and your two rooms were were not a whole house. 
When a man starts for the Klondike, if he is a wise man, 
he considers beforehand whether the result he is going to 
achieve is worth the sacrifice. That settled, the thing is to 
do it. He does not find fault there is no Pullman train 
across the mountains. When a man determines to enter 
the army and understands all the sacrifice that is needed 
for the campaign, he expects discomforts. It is only the 
imcompetent soldier that grumbles because things are not 
what they are at home. 

Singleness of purpose settles everything. And this is 
what Christ did : He did not go through the world lamenting 
that He could not have this luxury and that comfort, and so 
making sacrifices day by day and hour by hour. He once 
for all settled this ; I am here to do the Father's will, to ac- 
complish the Father's mission, to bring about so far as in me 
lies the kingdom of God on the earth; everything that 
helps that helps me, everything that hinders that hinders me. 

So it was nothing to Him that he was poor. On the 
whole, the only way He could work was in poverty. And 
when men came to join Him, he said, T.cavc your fishing 
nets and boats and follow me ; and when the young niau 
came who was rich he said to him. Sell your goods, give to 



212 " OUR LEADER. 

the poor, take the same conditions that we have. It was 
nothing to Him that he was shut out from the best society. 
He would have Hked it ; He would have enjoyed the best 
society. But he had settled once for all that He was in the 
world for a mission, and the best society of His time was 
against the mission. He was not haunted by questions of 
fear as to duty. The one line of duty was fixed, and along 
that line he marched with undeviating tread. Nothing 
could disturb it. When He went to Jerusalem, and Thomas 
said, " Let us go and die with him, he did not halt. When 
Peter said, God forbid that you should be crucified ! He 
said, Get thee behind me, Satan 1 When He was preaching, 
and the people said, He is crazy, and his mother tried to 
get him away. He simply sent out word, IMy mother, my 
brother, my sister are those that do the will of my Father 
which is in heaven, and went right on. 

And so He lived a joyous Hfe. T know what the prophet 
says — He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief ; 
and I know how this aspect of His life has been painted 
and pictured and sculptured in the history and the arts of 
the church ; but the prophet looked far across the centuries 
and saw the outward environment of a life lived in poverty, 
in separation from that which is congenial, under circum- 
stances which, but for the eternal purposes, would have been 
a hfe of sorrow and of grief. He could not look into the 
heart of this man. Do you not think this man believed 
what He taught ? Do you remember what was one of his first 
messages? '^Blessed are the meek, they shall inherit the 
earth. Blessed are the pure in spirit, they shall see God. 
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the 
children of God. Blessed are those that are persecuted for 
righteousness' sake, for theirs shall be the kingdom of 
heaven.' ' That is what He said, and that is what He believed. 
And He carried in His life the joy of one who inherited the 



"OUR LEADER. 21 3 

earth, and, therefore, did not need to struggle for it ; who 
saw God, and therefore did not need to enter into the 
theological debates about Him ; who was happy in persecu- 
tion for righteousness* sake, because persecution for right- 
eousness' sake hastened on the kingdom of righteousness on 
the earth. I know what Isaiah said — "man of sorrows 
and acquainted with grief" — but I also know that in the 
very last hour of His interview with His disciples, when 
He was about to go up to the crucifixion, almost His last 
word was " My joy I give unto you." I know it is said 
that He wept, but never laughed. Yes, wept, but never for 
Himself, never over His own sorrow; wept at the grave 
of Lazarus, as through that grave he saw the sorrows of 
other weeping ones through all the ages ; wept, as out of 
the triumphal procession he looked down upon Jerusalem 
and saw the doom that awaited it; wept for others; 
while his heart was full of the joy of self-sacrificing service 
for His God. 

Thus in the world, seeking to know His Father's will, 
seeking always to do it, seeing as His Father's will the 
building up of a new order and a new kingdom in the 
world, a kingdom of love and of righteousness and of pu- 
rity, setting Himself to this with a singleness of purpose that 
settled all questions of sacrifice instantly and forever, liv- 
ing this life joyously, referring to the sports of children, to 
the dancing and merry-making of the harvest, to the fes- 
tival occasion, always with approbation, never with con- 
tempt — this Christ lived in the kingdom about which He 
taught. The kingdom of heaven was not to Him a kingdom 
in the future to which by and by He was going, nor a king- 
dom up above Him from which He had descended antl to 
wliich He would return again; He lived in the kingdom of 
heaven. He was in it, and therefore He had the joy that 
was the life of it. 



214 '' OUR leader/* 

Can a man be in two places at once ? No, but he may 
be in two atmospheres at once. A professor comes out of 
Yale or Harvard or Princeton to undertake a little work of 
university extension, or he comes down into a college set- 
tlement and gathers the ignorant and the unkempt and the 
careless round about him, and he belongs to the kingdom 
of letters while he teaches literature. And they know it, 
they see it ; they understand that this man is not of them ; 
that he is another kind of man ; that he has another kind of 
life than theirs ; that he has come to bring that life to them, 
and that he is living it now. A teacher takes a deaf and 
dumb child and undertakes to teach him how to speak, and 
while teaching him how to speak this teacher lays aside the 
ordinary methods of speech of her life and comes down to 
the infirmities and the incapacities of the deaf and dumb 
and talks his language for him. Does she then cease to 
hear or cease to speak? Ah^ no; she comes out of her 
larger life and yet carries it with her. So this Christ lived 
a double life ; He lived a life in the kingdom of heaven while 
He was living on the earth. He had not to go far to find 
His Father, as sometimes we have to go. He recognized 
the infirmities of men and told them to pray in spite of 
obstacles ; but He never found an obstacle to His praying ; 
it was easy to Him. '* I have meat to eat that you know 
not of,'* He said to His disciples, ^^ you will scatter and leave 
me alone, and yet I shall not be alone, for the Father is 
with me.'* And when they saw Him transfigured on the 
mountain top, they were not surprised ; it seemed the most 
natural thing that this man who had walked with them as a 
man from another sphere should be seen for this moment 
as in the other sphere, transfigured, luminous. And so He 
lived a double life ; for while He lived in the kingdom of 
heaven He lived on earth. Most human was He, most thor- 
oughly human, ministering to men^ coming down to men, 



"OUR LEADER. 21$ 

really coming to them, really entering into their life, really 
sharing it, a man among men. No simple mover here and 
there as opportunity chanced for Him, but one who of de- 
liberate and set purpose entered into the human life and 
shared it with humanity. 

He sometimes grew very weary and worn with the stu- 
pidity of His disciples, but their stupidity could not separate 
Him from them. He sometimes wondered at the sluggish- 
ness of the people, but their dull ignorance could not sep- 
arate Him from them.. He flamed out with indignation 
against the deliberate sin of hypocrites and Pharisees, but 
even the deliberate sin of hypocrites and Pharisees could 
not separate Him from them, and the invective of His words 
ended with a lament for them and a cry to them to come 
back to righteousness and to God. Nothing, nothing, no 
folly, no ignorance, no sin could separate Him from men. 
He spoke sometimes with weariness. He spoke sometimes 
with wonder, He spoke sometimes with indignation, but 
never did He speak of men with contempt. He respected 
men. 

This or something like this, it seems to me, this Christ 
was in the world : One who sought only to know what 
the Father's will was and to do it ; one who found this 
Father's will to be the bringing about of a new and splendid 
kingdom on the earth, and who girded Himself to that one 
purpose ; one who set Himself to that with a singleness of 
purpose, such as made all apparent self-sacrifice easy ; one 
who in that singleness of purpose to do His Father's will 
in the bringing about of His kingdom upon the earth lived 
a human life, yet lived it with God His Father, carrying 
with Him, not around His head an aureole of glory, as the 
ancient painters painted it, but around His whole person a 
luminous atmosphere of life and love that shone from Ilim 
because God dwelt in Him. Witli surh a pic turc as this, 



2l6 ''OUR LEADER." 

only infinitely finer, grander, deeper, larger and more celes- 
tial, John, the beloved disciple, John who knew Him, John 
who understood Him better than anybody else, John who 
lay on His bosom, John who saw His divinity as no other 
person saw it, John said, '' As he is, so are we in this world.'* 
Christian brethren, I leave you to ask yourselves the ques- 
tion, as I ask it of myself, As He was, are you, am I, in 
this world? 



OUR CITIZENSHIP. 

" But seek ye first the kingdom of God^ and His righteousness?^ 

(Matthew^ vi, '^'^) 

Last Sunday morning I tried to point out to you that 
Christ Himself sought first the kingdom of God and His 
righteousness ; I tried to show you what were some of the 
essential characteristics of Christ's life ; that He came to 
this world, not to do His own will, but the will of the 
Father which had sent Him, and that He understood that 
will to be the establishment on the earth of a new kingdom, 
which He sometimes called the kingdom of God, because 
its central principle is loyalty to God ; sometimes the king- 
dom of heaven, because it is the kingdom of ordered love 
which prevails in heaven ; and that while He was on the 
earth He still lived in this kingdom of God or this kingdom 
of heaven and proclaimed it to men. He was only at work 
in the world about three years, and that was not time 
enough to establish such a kingdom, to work such a revolu- 
tion, to substitute hope in the hearts of men for dull de- 
spair, and love for selfishness, and faith for sensuousness ; 
indeed, He said, more than once, that this kingdom of God 
or of heaven could not be made, but it must grow ; it could 
not be manufactured, but it must be cultivated. While He 
still lived He called a few men about Him to be His follow- 
ers; that is, to unite with Him in establishing and main- 
taining this kingdom of ordered love, this kingdom of 

217 



2l8 OUR CITIZENSHIP. 

heaven, this kingdom whose central principle is loyalty 
to God, doing not our own will, but the will of the Father 
who hath sent us, in establishing and maintaining this 
kingdom upon the earth ; and when He died He left it as a 
heritage to them and those who should follow after Him, to 
all those who had the vision to see the beauty of such a 
kingdom and the desire to accomplish it and the heroism 
to undertake its accomplishment. 

In the Sermon on the Mount, He guarded them against 
the danger of trying to do two things at once. Do not. He 
said, imagine that you can build up this kingdom by taking 
for it a part of your time or giving to it a part of your 
energy. Make it the first thing. Do not make the first 
thing getting clothes or shelter or food, the very necessaries 
of life, make the first thing building up and maintaining 
the kingdom of unselfishness, of love and faith and hope, 
the kingdom of heaven and of God; make it the first 
object of your life to build up and maintain this kingdom, 
as I have made it the first object of my life to build up and 
maintain this kingdom, and leave the other things to 
follow. 

But when the minister addresses such a congregation as 
this, and urges this high ideal upon them, they answer to 
themselves (if not to him) this is quite impracticable. You 
can give yourself wholly to building up and maintaining the 
kingdom of God, because for that very purpose we give you 
a salary and provide for your needs. But what shall I do, 
says the merchant, who have my store to keep ! Do you 
advise me to close it to-morrow morning and go off to look 
after the interests of the kingdom of heaven? What shall 
I do, says the mother, who have my children to care for? 
If I go off to a nunnery and enter a sisterhood and give 
myself to building up and maintaining the kingdom of God 
on the earth, who shall take care of my children ? What 



OUR CITIZENSHIP. 219 

shall I do, says the doctor; who have my patients to attend 
to ? Shall I leave them to sicken and die while I give my- 
self to building up and maintaining the kingdom of God 
upon the earth? These are very practical questions, and 
the questioners are quite right. The merchant is not to 
leave his business to follow Christ ; the mother is not to 
leave her children to follow Christ ; the doctor is not to 
leave his patients to follow Christ. You are not to leave 
your various vocations in order to give yourselves to the 
work of building up and maintaining the kingdom of God. 
What is this kingdom of God — this kingdom whose cen- 
tral principle is loyalty to God, this kingdom of heaven — 
this kingdom which is like the ordered love of heaven? 
What does it include? Is it something apart from us? 
Has it a territory of its own and a time of its own and a 
character of its own that distinguishes it from the common 
life ? Not at all. The kingdom of God is to be a king- 
dom of God on the earth made out of human materials ; it 
is to be a kingdom of the present society transformed by a 
new spirit. The kingdoms of this world are to become the 
kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ — this is the decla- 
ration. Let me read you what one of the earlier Hebrew 
prophets says about it : 

" In that day shall there be upon the bells of the horses, 
holiness unto the Lord ; and the pots in the Lord's house 
shall be like the bowls before the altar. Yea, every pot in 
Jerusalem and in Judah shall be holiness unto the Lord of 
hosts : and all they that sacrifice shall come and take of 
them, and seethe therein : and in that day there shall be 
no more the Canaanite in the house of the Lord of hosts.'' 

You have been in that great, crowded, crushing city of 
London, with the whir and the buzz and the noise of its 
streets in your ears ; and out of the crowded thoroughfares 
and out of the halls of Westminster where the politics are 



220 OUR CITIZENSHIP. 

going on, you have slipped into Westminster Abbey, and 
have sat down there among the ashes of the noble dead ; 
you have seen the splendid monuments which have been 
reared to their memory; you have heard the music which 
seems to drip out of the very ceihng and ooze out of the 
very walls, and you have said : This is holy ground ; I am 
in the kingdom of heaven for this short hour. Zachariah 
had a different vision. He did not think there should be 
some splendid cathedral, some noble abbey, some beauti- 
ful worshiping place into which men might retreat from the 
bustle and stir of life, but the holiness that drips from the 
ceihng and oozes from the wall, the holiness that is seen in 
the golden and silver implements on the altar, the holiness 
that shines in the white robes of the vested choir, the holi- 
ness that is spoken in the words of the priest — this holiness 
shall also sound in the very tinkling bells of the dray horses, 
in the very rattle of the cabs, in the very cry of the omni- 
bus drivers, and be graven on the very pots and kettles of 
the houses. 

All things are to be brought into the kingdom of God. 
Not only all things, all thoughts. Says Paul: ^^ Casting 
down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth it- 
self against the knowledge of God, and bringing into cap- 
tivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.'* Minis- 
ters' thoughts? Yes. Sunday-school teachers' thoughts? 
Yes. Thoughts of the woman in the kitchen ; thoughts of 
the merchant in the store ; thoughts of the lawyer in the 
court room ; thoughts of the soldier in the camp ; thoughts 
of the statesman in the closet ; thoughts of the doctor at 
the sick-bed ; thoughts of the mother in the sick-room ; all 
brought to the building up of the kingdom of God. If 
this is not possible, then Christ is wrong. If the mother 
must leave her children or the merchant his store or the 
lawyer his clients or the doctor his patients in order to help 



OUR CITIZENSHIP. 221 

build up and maintain the kingdom of God, then the 
kingdom is impracticable, and Christ was wrong and Paul 
was wrong and the prophets were wrong. 

What is necessary to be done to make the kingdom of 
God on the earth? What sort of men and women must 
there be, and what should these men and women be doing? 
There must be some men who will be the heralds of this 
kingdom of God ; who will go to men who have erred and 
strayed, who are apathetic and indifferent and rouse them 
to see j who will give themselves, going from place to place 
and from man to man saying, There is something better 
than the kingdom of selfishness, there is a kingdom of love ; 
there is something better than the kingdom of Mammon, 
there is a kingdom of God on the earth. There must be 
warriors for this kingdom. There are forces in operation 
to overcome it and to beat it down. There were in Christ's 
time as there are in our time. The same interests that 
undertook to destroy Christ are still trying to destroy 
Christian truth and Christian life. Unselfishness cannot 
lift itself up and make itself aggressive without fighting 
selfishness. Love itself is the enemy of all forms of un- 
loveliness and there must be warriors who stand to battle 
for the freedom of man, for the right of man to worship God 
according to the dictates of his own conscience, for the 
liberty of man to walk untrammeled of human law save 
as human law be necessary to keep him from doing wrong to 
his neighbor. There must be in the time of the Reformation 
a JvUther, in the time of religious war a Cromwell or a 
William the Silent. There must be warriors in our own 
time, when corruption threatens to undermine the state, 
just as there must have been warriors for the ITnion when 
open war threatened to destroy it. There nuist be wanii^rs 
to fii^Hit for the kingdom of God. There must be teac'hei.^ 
men wliosc business it shall be to understand what the \n\n- 



222 OUR CITIZENSHIP. 

ciples of the kingdom of God are and how the principles 
are to be applied to daily life, and to all the varied problems 
of daily life, and who must give themselves in singleness of 
purpose to the one work of teaching. If the teacher un- 
dertakes to do the work of the warrior or the work of the 
evangelist, he makes a mistake. For the most part, the 
teacher must be a teacher and the herald must be a herald. 
If the teacher attempted both to teach to his Christian 
congregation what are the principles of the kingdom of God 
and how they are applicable to human affairs, and also to 
go out to those who have never heard of the kingdom of God, 
or are indifferent, and endeavor to attract them to it and 
draw them to it, he is likely to do neither well. The evan- 
gelist must be an evangelist, the teacher must be a teacher, 
the warrior a warrior. There must be workers in this 
kingdom ; executive and administrative men who are to 
afford aid, and as there are men who are teaching truth, 
so must there be men who are incorporating that truth into 
church action, into organic life, into the full mechanism 
for carrying this kingdom of God on. 

But is this all? Heralds to proclaim, teachers to in- 
struct, warriors to fight, workers to afford it aid — is this 
all? There is something a great deal more important than 
all these ; it is the kingdom itself. Of what avail to go her- 
alding, saying there is a kingdom of God, if there is no 
kingdom? Of what avail to teach the principles of the 
kingdom if nowhere those principles are manifested? Of 
what avail to fight for the kingdom if the kingdom itself 
does not exist ? The first thing, the most important thing, 
the vital and essential thing is the existence of the king- 
dom itself. And this is to be a kingdom of all things and 
a kingdom of all thoughts. It is a kingdom of God in the 
business, it is a kingdom of God in the family, it is a king- 
dora of God in politics, it is a kingdom of God in society. 



OUR CITIZENSHIP. 223 

Then the herald can go and say, Behold, there is a king- 
dom, come and join it ; then the teacher can say, Behold, 
there is a kingdom, these are the principles of it, and thus 
are they applied to daily life ; then the warrior can say, 
There is a kingdom worth fighting for, and for it I put on 
my armor and sacrifice myself and die if need be. What 
is necessary to make patriotic Americans ? There must be 
ambassadors to represent America at foreign courts, and 
perhaps immigration agents to invite Italians and Poles 
and Hungarians to a land of freedom across the sea ; there 
must be teachers in our public schools to tell the children 
what is the history of America and what are its principles, 
and to unfurl its flag before them, and to inspire loyalty in 
their hearts ; there must be soldiers to put on the sword 
and shoulder the musket when America is threatened by 
foreign foe or by domestic treason ; there must be states- 
men to incorporate into the laws of the nation the princi- 
ples of America, the principles of liberty and justice and 
equality, the principles that are on the whole incorporated 
by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution 
of the United States. There must be all these, but is this 
all ! No, far more important than ambassador or agent, 
than teacher or warrior, is America itself. The mother who 
is making a sweet American home, the business man, the 
railroad president who is pushing a railroad across the 
continent and with steel bars is binding state to state, the 
preacher who is not preaching politics, and yet is preach- 
ing such principles of righteousness appHed to pubUc affairs 
as are elevating steadily the conscience and the moral 
sense of the nation, the merchant who is seeking to push 
on American trade by all legitimate and n()l)le methods, 
are not these also making America? and of what avail the 
immigrant runner, of what avail the public school teacher, 
of what avail the warrior, if they are not in the homes, in 



224 OUR CITIZENSHIP. 

the counting-rooms, in the business offices, in all the land, 
a thousand patriotic Americans who are making America 
to one who is talking about it. 

To seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness 
is not to drop everything and go after what is called the 
conversion of souls. There are men who must drop every- 
thing and give themselves to bringing men into the king- 
dom ; there are men who must drop everything and give 
themselves to teaching the principles of the kingdom ; there 
are times when patriots must drop everything and stand as 
soldiers brave and heroic for that kingdom when it is en- 
dangered ; there are men who must bring their executive 
abiHty to bear to build up the kingdom in all its organic 
machinery; but far more important than these all com- 
bined is making the kingdom by living in it. 

It is mine to talk about the kingdom, it is yours to live 
the kingdom. Paul has defined the kingdom. He says it 
is not meat and drink, it is righteousness and peace and 
joy in the Holy Spirit ; that is, in holiness of spirit made 
holy by communion with the Spirit of God. It is right- 
eousness — walking in right paths ; it is peace — an end to 
the furrowed brow and the careworn cheek and the hur- 
ried, worried, vexed and irritated spirit; and joy — what 
kind of joy? the joy of those beatitudes: Blessed are the 
meek, blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the pure in 
heart, blessed are the persecuted for righteousness' sake — 
the joy of holiness of spirit. 

It is a great thing to be permitted every Sunday morn- 
ing to talk about this kingdom, to talk about right paths, to 
talk about peace, and to talk about blessedness that comes 
through holiness ; it is a great thing to be permitted to go 
into the outside world and tell men who have never heard 
of it, men who are apathetic and indifferent, of the glory of 
entering into this kingdom ; it is a great thing in time of 



i 



OUR CITIZENSHIP. 225 

danger to stand steadfast as a sentinel guarding this king- 
dom from attack ; it is a great thing to work with steady 
hand and patient purpose in the upbuilding of all the or- 
ganic machinery necessary to carry on this kingdom, but it 
is far greater to walk in right paths, to possess the peace- 
ful spirit, and to be radiant with the joy of hoHness. 

I imagine you filing before me, one after another, as 
this sermon is through, and saying to me. What shall I do ? 
I will give you the text I would read to answer your question : 

" Then said he to the multitude that came forth to be 
baptized of him, O generation of vipers, who hath warned 
you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth, there- 
fore, fruits worthy of repentance, and begin not to say 
within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father : for I 
say unto you, That God is able of these stones to raise up 
children unto Abraham. And now also the axe is laid un- 
to the root of the trees ; every tree therefore which bringeth 
forth not good fruit, is hewn down, and cast into the fire. 
And the people asked him, saying, What shall we do then? 
He answereth and saith unto them. He that hath two coats, 
let him impart to him that hath none ; and he that hath 
meat, let him do likewise. Then came also publicans to be 
baptized, and said unto him, Master, what sliall we do? 
And he said unto them. Exact no more than that which is 
appointed you. And the soldiers likewise demanded of 
him, saying. And what shall we do? And He said unto thcu;. 
Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely ; and be 
content with your wages.*' 

And so as I imagine you thus coming before me say- 
ing, What shall I do, I want to seek first the kingdom of 
God? One says, I am a lawyer, Avhat shall I do? I say, 
Go back to your office and carry on your administration of 
law so as to make justice regnant in the community. And 
another says, I am a merchant, what shall I do? and I say, 
Go back and write holiness on the bells of your horses ; re- 

15 



226 OUR CITIZENSHIP. 

member that your clerks are your brother men and treat 
them as brethren. Another comes and says, I am a manu- 
facturer, what shall I do? and I say to him. Treat the 
workmen that are in your employ as your brother men, and 
ask yourself not the question what is the least I can possibly 
give them and the most that I can get out of them, but 
what is fair raid right and reasonable and just as between 
man and man, what I would have them do to me if they 
were employers and I workman. And the mother says, I 
have my little children, what shall I do? and I say. Love 
your little children, teach them to love one another, walk 
your own way toward God and lead them by your hand 
toward God. Do not leave your children to seek first the 
kingdom of God, nor your store to seek first the kingdom 
of God, nor your office to seek first the kingdom of God, 
nor your place wherever it is to seek first the kingdom of 
God — the kingdom of God is needed, just where you are. 

Oh, sometimes I feel the exaltation of preaching, and 
sometimes I am bowed down ^^'ith the humiliation of it ; for 
I stand here and preach charit}^ to women who are giving 
their lives to the ser\'ice of love, and honesty to men who 
sacrifice in business affairs because of their conscience as I 
have never been asked to sacrifice, and to teachers patience 
and service, whose practical service and real patience out- 
run my o\^Ti imaginings ; and sometimes I wish that I could 
go from this pulpit and give my message to other peoples 
that I think need it more. This is the kingdom of God : 
Righteousness, peace, joy in the Holy Spirit; holiness writ- 
ten on the bells of the horses, hoHness engraved on the pots 
and kettles in the kitchen. 

The first thing, therefore, for you to do, whoever you 
are, is to find out whether you are in this kingdom or not. 
Some men are born into it, and some get into it by un- 
realized process. Some men never know how they got into 



OUR CITIZENSHIP. 22/ 

it, have always lived in the kingdom of the unselfish, in the 
kingdom of love, in the kingdom of God, and then think 
they are not in it because they do not know how they got 
in j and others live without as foreigners and one day wake 
up to the fact that they are in a splendid kingdom and re- 
member the very day when they took their oath of alle- 
giance. It does not matter. Are you in God's kingdom? 
It is well sometimes to put the question to ourselves. What 
are we here for and what are we doing with ourselves ? Are 
you living for yourself, self-centered, then you are in the 
kingdom of selfishness. Are you living on the whole to 
make other people happy, then you are living in what I 
call the kingdom of good nature. Are you living to make 
the world better, then you are living in the world of phil- 
anthropy. Are you, in this effort to make the world bet- 
ter, recognizing Christ as a Master, recognizing Him as a 
leader. Are you seeking to do Christ's work in Christ's 
way, then you are in the kingdom of Christ. It cannot be 
very difficult for you to find out. It is not a question what 
you believe ; it is not a question whether you were bap- 
tized ; it is not a question whether you belong to a church ; 
it is a question whether you are self-centered or living under 
the impulse of haphazard good-nature or are seeking the 
welfare of your fellow-men and seeking that welfare of your 
icliow-men wherever you are and in all your avocations 
under the inspiration and the leadership of Christ as your 
Master? This kingdom of Christ offers a divine life and a 
divine Master to follow. There are some who hear the 
voice and yet do not see the form ; some who follow Christ 
and think they follow duty, and some who follow Christ 
and think they follow philanthropy. They are not the 
happiest ; but I do not see how any man who believes that 
Jesus Christ came into the world to make a kingdom of 
God on the earth, who believes that through all these ecu- 



228 OUR CITIZENSHIP. 

turies He has been making a kingdom of God on the earth, 
that through all these centuries by gradual processes He has 
been substituting unselfishness for selfishness and hope for 
dull despair and faith for sensuousness, and that he can 
himself just where he is do something to help make this 
kingdom by himself being a part of the kingdom — I do not 
see how he can help living with joy in his heart and radi- 
ance on his face. Seek first this kingdom ; seek it in your 
lives where you are. 

Elevate our aspiration, purify our desires, cleanse our 
vision, and strengthen our heart, that we may see clearly, 
desire strenuously, stand bravely for Thee and Thy work on 
the earth. Amen. 



••CHILDREN OF GOD." 

Deuteronomy y xiv. i. — " Ye are the children of the Lor u your God.^"* 
Jeremiah^ Hi. 22. — " Return^ ye backsliding children^ and I will heal 

your backslidings," 

ActSy xvii, 28.—" * * * as certain also of your own poets have 

saidy For we are also his offspring.^^ 

Each of these verses declares, you observe, that men are 
God's children. The first declaration is made to the Chil- 
dren of Israel. It is made by the prophet to them as 
though they had not yet been trusted and tested and tried. 
"Ye," he says, ^^are God's children." It might well have 
been apprehended by them as an indication that they were 
God's favored ones. You, apart from the rest of mankind, 
you He has chosen to be His household. The second dec- 
laration is made by the prophet after they have been tested 
and have failed. *' You have sinned," the prophet says, 
" you have forsaken the Lord your God, you have become 
idolaters, you have sinned against me in innumerable ways, 
and still you are my children. Return, ye backslidmg chil- 
dren." They could not have thought that they were God's 
children because they were His favored ones, for this sen- 
tence stands in the midst of a chapter vehement in its de- 
nunciation of their iniquity. The third of my texts is taken 
from Paul's address on Mars Hill. He is speaking to 
Pagans — Greeks who had never heard of Jehovah — who 
knew nothing of the Old Testament (the New Testament 
did not exist) ; who knew nothing of Christ — nothing of 

229 



230 '' CHILDREN OF GOD. 

what we regard as the essential doctrines of Christianity — 
nothing of Christianity itself, nor anything of Judaism ; and 
he quotes one of their own heathen poets to illustrate the 
truth. "You pagans/' he says, "are God's offspring." 
Here you get the third application of the same great truth : 
First, those who are within the covenant of God and have 
made the covenant with Him are God's children ; second, 
those who have violated the covenant and sinned against 
God in every conceivable way — they are God's children ; 
and, third, those who have never heard of Him and are ap- 
parently ignorant of Him, except as nature has taught them 
something, those who have lived wholly outside of what we 
call the pale of revelation — they are God's children. 

It is the broad, general declaration that seems to run all 
through Scripture, that man is God's child. Not alone the 
intelligent man, the virtuous man, the Jew man or the 
Christian man, the converted man, or the regenerate man 
— man is God's child. He is God's child before he has 
been tested, while yet he lies in the cradle ; he is God's 
child when he has deliberately chosen the ways of wicked- 
ness and gone into them with his eyes wide open, knowing 
what he does ; and he is God's child if he has never at 
mother's knee Hsped " Our Father which art in heaven." 

The relationship between parent and child is a twofold 
relationship. It is a moral relationship, which involves, on 
the one hand, a certain duty of guidance and protection, 
and education on the father's part, and, on the other hand, 
a certain duty of loyalty and service and obedience on the 
child's part. But this moral relationship, this duty of pro- 
tection on the one hand, and of obedience on the other, is 
really based on another and a deeper truth — that this 
father and this child, these parents and these children, be- 
long to the same stock ; the same blood flows in their veins ; 
they have the same essential nature. These truths under- 



''CHILDREN OF GOD/* 23 1 

lie the doctrine of fatherhood as it is to be found in the 
Old Testament and the New Testament. There is first 
the moral relationship ; man owes duty toward God — a 
duty of obedience, of loyalty, of service and (I say it rev- 
erently) God owes duty toward man — a duty of protection 
of guidance, of just government, of righteous dealing. 
This is what is meant by the declaration, over and over 
again, that God is a righteous God. That is, He fulfills all 
that a child, weak, infirm, and sinful, has a right to ex- 
pect of his Father, and more. But this relationship de- 
pends upon the deeper truth, that God and man are kin, 
that man is made in God's own image, that he is made like 
God, that he possesses the attributes and qualities of God, 
that he is in his inherent and essential nature divine. He 
may have overlaid that divinity, he may have done much to 
undermine and despoil it, but still he is of the same kin 
as the Father who created him, and out of this kinship grows 
the relationship of service on the one hand and of pro- 
tection on the other, of obedience on the one hand and of 
righteous government on the other. 

This, then, is the truth I want to put before you this 
Sabbath morning — that we are all the offspring of God. 
Are there some little children here this morning, are there 
some mothers here whose hearts are with their little chil- 
dren at home? These little children are God's children 
whether or not they have been baptized, whether or not 
they have been brought into covenant relation with the 
church ; to them the prophet of Deuteronomy says, " You 
are the children of God." Are there any men or women 
here who are conscious that they have sinned against God, 
that they have done more than strayed away from Him, 
that they have deliberately set aside the interests of their 
nobler life for worldly interests, that they have deliberately 
chosen death rather than life, the world rather than God, 



232 *' CHILDREN OF GOD. 

— then I say with the prophet, '^ Return, ye backsliding 
children." Whatever your sin, however far you have gone, 
whatever you have done, still you are children of God. 
And, finally, could I conceive it possible that some men 
had strayed in here this morning who had never heard of 
the Gospel and knew nothing about it, to whom it was a 
mere name or not even that — -that some Chinaman or some 
Hindoo had come in here who was really living in a Chris- 
tian land, and yet dwelling in darkness, to him I would say 
with Paul, " Your own poets have told you that you are the 
offspring of God." 

The untested, the tested and failed, the ignorant and un- 
knowing, you are God's offspring, you are made in His 
likeness. 

The witness that we are God's offspring is manifold. It 
is found, in the first place, in our supremacy over all the 
rest of creation. He has given us something of the power 
which He Himself exercises. We are masters over the 
animal kind and subdue them, not by our greater strength, 
not by our greater astuteness, but by the divinity that is 
within us, by the quality of the spiritual nature which we 
possess that they do not possess and which separates us 
from them. We are masters over the natural forces of the 
world. Man is stronger than Niagara Falls ; although it 
may sweep him to destruction, he also may put his hand 
upon it and tame and harness it and make it light his streets 
and carry his packages for him. Man is stronger than the 
lightning ; although it may strike him to the earth and kill 
him, it cannot control him, and he can control it. In more 
radical words than I have dared to use this truth has been 
put before you by the Psalmist : ^^ What is man, that thou 
art mindful of him ? and the son of man, that thou visitest 
him ! For thou hast made him but little lower than God." 
That is the revised version, and it is unquestionably the 



'' CHILDREN OF GOD. 233 

right interpretation of the Hebrew. "Thou hast made 
him little lower than God, and crownest him with glory 
and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the 
work of thy hands, and hast put all things under his feet. 
All sheep and oxen, yea, and of beasts of the field. The 
fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever 
passeth through the paths of the seas.'^ 

God tests your kinship with him by giving to you and 
to me the power which He Himself exercises over the 
world of nature. And he gives a greater supremacy than 
that — far, far greater — He gives you supremacy over your- 
self. He endows you with his freedom. Man puts mana- 
cles on his fellow man ; God never. God makes man free, 
and then says to him, " Choose the right or the wrong, do 
the good or do the evil, choose death or choose life ; I put 
the responsibility, the power, the self-supremacy on you. 
Man has in himself and in the very citadel of his nature 
this power of holding the helm of his own life, directing, 
controlHng, shaping his own destiny. If man is not a free 
moral agent, then God is not. All the freedom that God 
himself possesses He has passed over to these children of 
His, and lets them cut their fingers, blister their feet, burn 
their hands until they smart, and go down in ways that 
lead to death, and still says, " You are gods, you shall do 
according to your will, suffering the consequences if you do 
wrong, rejoicing in the consequences if you do right, but 
masters of yourself. I know not how you feel, but I think 
a world of free moral agents, men who can do right or do 
wrong as they will is infinitely better, with all the sin that 
blots and blurs and mars it, than a world of well-ordered 
machines that do according to the will of another without 
will of their own. 

And with this supremacy over nature and this supremacy 
over the world, the Father calls you to do His work in the 



234 '' CHILDREN OF GOD.'* 

world. *' We are co-workers together with Him." To 
whom does that apply ? Doctors ? Yes. Preachers ? 
Certainly. Sunday-school teachers ? Yes. But to these 
not one whit more than to merchants and lawyers and man- 
ufacturers and doctors. The world of men, whether they 
know it or do not know it, are doing God's work in the 
world, endowed with God's power in the world, given the 
control of themselves and power over nature in the world, 
that they may do God's work. Are you a manufacturer ? 
God also is a manufacturer, putting His parts together with 
wonderful skill, which you endeavor to imitate in vain. All 
your laboratories operate from His laboratory; all your 
chemistry emanates from His professor's chair. Are you a 
merchant ? It is His winds that fill your sails and His 
forces that drive the busy wheels of your industry. Are 
you a lawyer ? He also administers justice. Are you a 
doctor ? He made the human frame and stored it with 
the powers of resistance to disease and co-operates with 
you — and more and more the doctors are coming to see 
that God co-operates with them, and more they are hold- 
ing their hands back with caution that what they call na- 
ture but we call God may work with them and for them. 
Are you a teacher? He is the great truth-giver, and gathers 
His pupils about Him ; the planetary system is the first 
great orrery, the first lessons are written in the heavens. 
Are you a mother ? More wonderful sculptor than Michael 
Angelo or Thorwaldsen, shaping the little child by forces 
from within, you are inspiring the babe as God inspires you, 
and God inspires you as you are inspiring the babe ; by the 
life that is within you. He and you together are shaping 
this child that is vital, living and immortal. You are doing 
God's work. You do not know it, perhaps ; but whether 
you know it or not, you are doing God's work or setting 
your will to oppose Him and thwart it. 



*' CHILDREN OF GOD.*' 235 

He bears this witness of our kinship with him by the 
strange sense of awe and of reverence that comes over all 
of us. Sometimes a conscious and an intelHgent awe be- 
fore a Supreme Being whom we dimly see yet heartily be- 
Heve in; sometimes a simple, strange, inexplicable, unin- 
terpreted sense of reverence for a something or a somewhat 
that lies beyond us. In vain we try to satisfy our con- 
science by taking the standards which our fellow-men give 
to us. In vain the merchant says, " I do no worse than my 
fellow-merchant in the trade." In vain the woman in so- 
ciety says, '^ Other women in society tell white lies as I do, 
and one must do so." In vain the lawyer says, " If I would 
win my cause, I must arrest justice and falsify truth." In 
vain the preacher says, " If I speak the truth in the pulpit 
I shall make disturbance in my congregation ; I had better 
speak with guarded tongue and gesture with gloved hands." 
When the merchant has come back to his home and the 
woman to her closet and the minister to his study, each 
must and does compare his life with some higher, ineffable, 
transcendent standard, and knows that all these human 
standards are idle, nugatory and vain. Though he shuts 
his eyes and will not look, though he shuts his ears and will 
not hear, still the voice of conscience speaks, still the vision 
of righteousness is before him, still he knows that there is 
another judgment than society can have, and still, whether 
he bows before it or not, in his heart of hearts he recognizes 
it. You know it. Man is not satisfied with vagueness ; he 
is not satisfied to know the things that science tells him can 
be known ; he is not satisfied to study the ])henomena in 
all their varied form. Man, says Paul, searches all things, 
even the deep things of ("lod. Yes, and this very fact that 
he is searching, following on, trying to know sonicthinL^ of 
the invisible and the eternal, brings to him the witness 1ie 
is not kin with the brutes but rather that he has a higher 



236 *' CHILDREN OF GOD/' 

kinship. He looks longingly through the grave and won- 
ders what is the world, if any, that lies beyond ; he looks 
longingly up into the skies and wonders who is the God that 
made the stars and rules the nations, if there be one. In 
vain does Dogmatism tell him he can know no more than 
they knew in the sixteenth century ; still he struggles on. 
In vain Agnosticism says you cannot know anything except 
what you have seen and heard — still he struggles on to know, 
and still Paul's words come in his heart whether he ever 
heard them or not, no man can know the experiences of 
man except by the experience of man that is within him. 
And so, because we ever strive to know the experiences 
that lie beyond, we have the witness within ourselves that 
there is within us a dormant, divine life. Men may shut 
their eyes and say through despair, " No creed, no immor- 
tality, no God ! " We live as though there were not. Ah, 
the pity of it ! Not a seed planted in the ground but struggles 
toward the sunlight. Not a chicken in the egg but pecks 
away that it may break through its integument. Not a bird 
half-fledged in the nest but waits for the time that it may fly. 
And men, only men, seek to go away from the sunlight into 
the darkness, seek to make their prison walls stronger that 
they may not break through, seek to stay within the nest 
and never know the glory of songful flight up to the heavens. 
Still the soul knows there is a sunlight, though it lives in 
the darkness and wonders what it is ; still it is dissatisfied 
with its prison walls and knows that there is a larger life 
than any it has yet tried ; still it wonders sometimes, whether 
it will ever have the power of flight, and if not, will not the 
children have it. 

We know this our kinship with God. We know it by 
the strange impulse and inspiration and aspiration and 
courage that come to us at times. "Be not weary in 
well-doing." I wonder if there is any man or woman in 



k 



"CHILDREN OF GOD." 237 

this congregation who does not know the meaning of that 
text ; I wonder if there is any one of you who has not some- 
times said, Let corruption in poHtics go on ; I am not go- 
ing to keep up the fight ; it is no use. I have fought the 
liquor-shop and the Hcentious hall as long as I can ; it reap- 
pears over and over again. I have fought the despotism of 
selfishness and destroyed slavery, and it appears in forms of 
free competition. May I wonder if there be one of us who 
does not sometimes feel himself like a ship out on the At- 
lantic Ocean, with fire beneath the hatches, all the time 
pouring the water on, sometimes with more smoke and 
sometimes with less, and sometimes with a little hope that 
the fire is out ; then suddenly the passion of heat, the pas- 
sion of temptation, the passion of anger, the passion of sen- 
suality springs out again when it seemed extinguished, and 
you are almost prepared to say, it is no use, I will give it up. 
And then has there not come to you, perhaps after a sleep, 
perhaps after a long vacation, perhaps after an enforced rest, 
a new courage and a new hope, and have you not risen from 
your bed of sickness, it may be, come forth from your vaca- 
tion, risen from your long night of sleep, with a new courage, 
hope and vigor and a new song ? There is more power in 
conscience than in greed, in right than wrong; there is 
more power in God than in all the forces of hell combined. 
And if there were not this sense of invisible reinforcement 
that comes to the poorest, that comes to those who have 
least faith, who do not understand the words that are spoken 
and do not perceive the vision before us, if it were not for 
this inspiration that comes to us, that inspires us afresh, the 
world would long since have lapsed into anarchy and chaos. 
Then, beyond all these, is a sense of divine communion, 
which reaches its supreme expression in this Supper spread 
before us this morning. This is the supreme symbol ; but 
the idea of communion with God is not confined to Chris- 



238 " CHILDREN OF GOD." 

tians who sit at the Lord's table. Run back over the pages 
of history as far as you can, and in the dim confines of the 
early beginning you find men and the gods sitting down at 
the table together ; you find men spreading the table with 
their feasts and inviting the gods to sup with them. Super- 
stitious you may call it; superstitious I grant in many 
forms it was ; and yet, after all, underlying it, at the root of 
it, the inspiration of it is this profound sense in humanity 
— Christian, Jewish, Pagan — that there is a possibility of 
fellowship between God and man, or the gods and men; 
not such communion as a collie dog has with its master,, 
but the communion of a soul with a soul that understands. 

And now some men will say to me, ^^ You are speaking 
as though there were no sin in the world. Do you recog- 
nize none ? Does not sin estrange men from God ? As 
a great ruin by the very character of the stones that are 
heaped one upon another, bears witness to the splendor of 
the fortress that is now forever gone, as the beauty of the 
pagan temples in Ephesus or Corinth, where the harbor is 
filled up, from which arts have departed, from which the 
priests have gone, where only the owls hoot at night and 
the jackals prey by day, as the very splendor of these ruins 
is witness of the splendor of the life that once throbbed 
there, and men still go there to find out what is divine in 
architecture, though the architecture be in ruins, so the 
very magnificence, the very awful splendor of the ruins of 
this race is the attestation of its divine architecture. 

I am not so radical as the Psalmist ; I am not so radical 
as Christ; I read from the loth chapter of John : 

" The Jews answered him, saying, For a good work we 
stone thee not ; but for blasphemy, and because that thou, 
being a man, makest thyself God. Jesus answered them, 
Is it not written in your law, I said. Ye are gods? If he 
called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and 



" CHILDREN OF GOD.'* 239 

the scripture cannot be broken ; Say ye of him whom the 
Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blas- 
phemist; because I said, I am the Son of God." 

Do you not see that the argument is just that which I 
have been trying to put before you? If the word of God 
can come to man, it is because there is in man a divine 
power to understand that word ; if the revelation of God 
can come to man, it is because there is in man a mirror 
which can reflect that manifestation ; because the disclosure 
and word and speech of God comes to man, therefore, says 
Christ, he is himself a god. You are the children of God, 
says Deuteronomy; you are the backsliding children of 
God, says Jeremiah ; you are the offspring of God, says 
Paul ; but Christ, more radical than Deuteronomy or Jere- 
miah or Paul, says, you are gods, because the word of God 
comes to you and you can hear Him. Whatever life you 
are living, whoever you are, whatever you know or do not 
know, whatever work you have done or are not doing, 
whatever sins you have committed or are committing now, 
you are the children of God. You may turn away from 
your Father and abandon Him and refuse His authority, 
but still you are the children of God. You can break the 
moral relationship, but you cannot break the other — that is 
indissoluble, unalterable. You are the children of God. 
Come ! come ! court no longer the darkness when the sun- 
light beckons you stay, no longer in the nest when the 
bright air without calls you; be content no longer un- 
fledged in the nest when you might spread your wings and 
fly away. Come ! come ! you are God's children. Come 
to your home ; come to your Father, 



SAVED BY HOPE. 

" We are saved by hope^^ 

Romans^ viii. 24. 

The practical man, if he will stop and consider what this 
verse means, not hesitating to criticise because it is in the 
Bible, will shake his head at it — No, he will say, hope is a 
pleasant companion but a perilous counselor; hope has 
destroyed more than it has saved ; more men have been 
destroyed by hope in business, a thousandfold more, than 
by excessive caution. The hopeful man buys some sub- 
urban lots, or purchases stock, or gets what he thinks to be 
a mine ; and because he hopes his suburban lots will be 
worth as many dollars a running foot as they were before 
an acre, and because he hopes that the stock that he bought 
at 40 will be worth 100, and because he hopes that his 
mine may bring forth untold millions, he thinks that al- 
ready his lots, his stock, his mine, are worth these values, 
and he says so ; and presently he has involved himself and 
the friends who trusted in his word in bankruptcy. They 
think he has lied ; no, he has only mistaken his hopes for 
history. And the student of political life will say — saved 
by hope ? It was hope that brought this nation into its 
peril. Why it was because hopeful men who said. We need 
not trouble ourselves, slavery will die a natural death while 
slavery, growing with its growth and strengthening with its 
strength sapped the life-blood out of half the nation and 

240 



SAVED BY HOPE. 24I 

corrupted the life-blood in the other half, until it was strong 
enough to take us by the throat, and only four years of 
long struggle served to determine whether we should live 
or no. It was thus we paid the penalty of the excessive 
hopefulness of serene men who said, Oh, do not trouble 
yourself about the future, the future will take care of itself. 
And religious men will say to you — saved by hope? Hope 
is a dangerous child to take counsel of. For men there 
are who will tell you that God is merciful and you need not 
trouble, that God is pitiful and He will pardon ; do as you 
will, live as you will ; you may suffer some little thing in 
the future ; but, after all, we are saved by hope, go on, have 
a good time now, let the future take care of itself, all will 
be well, God is love. 

I think, however, that if we will look at this text a little 
more deeply and will look at the meaning of hope a little 
more plainly, we shall see a profounder truth in the state- 
ment " we are saved by hope ^^ than we have been wont to 
think. It is difficult to analyze a principle, and yet perhaps 
we shall get a little clearer conception of the meaning of 
the principle contained in this text if we try to analyze it ; 
and I think that we shall find it is composed of these two 
elements, desire and expectation. A man hopes for that 
which he both wishes and, in larger or smaller measure, ex- 
pects to obtain. If he expects to obtain it and does not 
wish for it he does not hope, he may fear; if he wishes for 
it but does not have any expectation that he can ever attain 
it, he will despair but he will not hope. A criminal has 
been tried, convicted, sentenced, and his la^vyer says to 
him. There is one more hope, I will go to the Governor 
and see if I can get a pardon ; when the lawyer is gone the 
convict still hopes because he desires to be saved and he 
has some expectation that he can be saved ; but when the 
lawyer returns and says the Governor has refused the pardon, 
16 



242 SAVED BY HOPE, 

there is nothing left, then he still expects the gallows but 
he does not hope for it ; he still desires life but he does not 
hope for life^ his expectation is destroyed. And the quality 
and measure of hope depends upon the strength and the 
character of these two elements. If a man's desires are 
high and pure and his expectation clear and strong his life 
will be full of inspiration ; if his desires are low and mean 
or his expectation weak and feeble his life will not be full 
of inspiration. 

These are fundamental questions of life : What do you 
wish for, and how much do you think you can get ? If 
your wish is for the highest things, but you think there is no 
possible chance, you will not endeavor to get them. You 
remember that the fox, when the grapes hung too high for 
him to get, said, " Sour grapes ! " No matter how sweet a 
bunch may look to the vision, if you say, I never can get it, 
you will pass on. 

Now the Bible comes with its Gospel message (and the 
Gospel message begins with the first chapter of Genesis and 
does not end until the last chapter of Revelation) to quicken 
hope, to make hope larger and richer and better, and then 
to supplement it by new hopes. We are saved by this 
hope. It does not mean merely this : We are shut up here 
in a dungeon of despair, but look for a time when we shall 
come out again. You remember in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress, how the pilgrims were locked up by Giant Despair in 
the castle, and how Christian found a key that let him out 
into the sunlight. Hope is not that, or at least it is some- 
thing a great deal more than that ; it is not. You sorrow 
now, but you will have joy hereafter ; You sin now, but you 
will be righteous hereafter; it is more than that. The 
Gospel hope comes to put a new desire into men, and 
along with that desire a new expectation, and so by kin- 
dling a new desire and a new expectation to create in them 



SAVED BY HOPE. 243 

a new life, and men are saved by hope just in the measure 
in which they get the new desire and the new expectation 
and see that there is something better than they had thought 
it was possible to attain. 

The Gospel comes, then, in the first place, to tell us 
that we can and are to have dominion over the earth. 
You remember how the pagans looked upon the forces of 
nature? The lightnings were the thunderings of the gods; 
the sea was ruled by one god, the mountains by another, 
the clouds by another and the storms by another ; all the 
forces of nature were gods, and man, man was the serf of 
these forces of nature, they were to control him, he was to 
bow down before them, he was to make sacrifices to them, 
he was to secure their service if he could, but they were 
supreme. Not only the forces of nature, but animals were 
deities. The common people of Egypt worshiped not 
only the forces of nature but they worshiped the very 
animals. The fox that fed upon the grass, the river Nile 
along whose banks he fed, the crocodile that burrowed in 
the mud, the very beetle that rolled the ball of earth be- 
neath his feet, were all sacred deities. And the first word 
that greets us in the New Testament is this : Pagans, you 
are mistaken, you are not to bow down before these forces 
of nature, these animals ; they are not your gods, they are 
your servants ; you are to take them, harness them and 
make them your own. Genesis and science at odds ! You 
may almost say that all practical science is based on that 
declaration in Genesis, that God made man and put him 
upon the earth and said to him, Now have dominion over 
the forces of nature and over the animals that disport them- 
selves upon it age after age ; for ever since science lias 
been trying to find the way to gain that dominion, and has 
gotten it little by little, inch by inch, step by step. T read 
in the paper the other day— you probably did — that Nicola 



244 SAVED BY HOPE. 

Tesla says that he has such mastery of electricity that he 
can control that force without a wire, and expects to sit 
in his office and communicate at his will with distant sail- 
ing ships. He has not done it yet, but he says he shall. 
Will he ? I do not know. I, for my part, have given up 
saying that anything is impossible. You remember how the 
scientists (some of them) said. You can never sail a steamer 
across the Atlantic Ocean. They demonstrated with figures 
that no steamer could carry coal enough to take it across the 
Atlantic, and I believe that the first steamer that came 
across the Atlantic brought the demonstration to America. 
We have run across the continent, we have sailed across 
the seas, we are tr}ing to fly in the air. This Gospel 
message has kindled a new desire. The old pagans did 
did not have it ; to-day the North American Indian does 
not have it ; he has no notion that it is within his possibility 
to rule nature ; the forces of nature are to him half deified 
and he bows before them. But this message comes to men 
and inspires them first w^ith the desire to master nature, and 
then with the confidence. We can. We try it and fail, and 
still God says, You can, and we try it again and again and fail ; 
and still there comes the message, Persevere, you may, you 
can, you will ; and a new life is put into mankind, and it is 
by the new life or new desire for mastery over nature and 
the new expectation that we can have it, that we are saved 
scientifically. It gives us, this Gospel, a new desire and a 
new expectation respecting what we call the ills of life and 
respecting disease that men did not think could be con- 
quered. Disease came as an infliction of the gods ; it w^as 
impious to fight against the gods ; it was hopeless to fight 
against them. You remember how the Spartan Greeks 
laid the feeble down to die because they could not do any- 
thing for them. You remember how hospitals really came 
in with Christianity. You remember how the whole in- 



SAVED BY HOPE. 245 

spiration to deal practically with disease, not only to alle- 
viate it but to do battle against it and finally to vanquish it, 
has come in through the Bible and through the Gospel, if 
you take the Gospel in the large way as including the Old 
Testament as well as the New Testament. Faith cure ! 
Why certainly. All cures are faith cures ; there are no 
others ; only faith in God is not folding your arms and 
saying to Him, You do all, it is asking Him, What have I 
to do? and doing that. Not the man who says, God can 
cure me without means, and eats and drinks and works 
violating all laws of health that science prescribes, and 
dies ; lie is not the man who exercises faith. But the man 
who goes down to Havana knowing that he is taking his 
life in his hands and studies the conditions of yellow fever in 
that fever-breeding city and ponders the problem how the 
monster may be throttled, and comes home to die in our own 
city, to die that others may live ; this is the man who has 
faith; not Harold Frederick; Col. Waring, the man who 
dies that other men may live and he by his dying may van- 
quish disease ; he puts a new heart of hope in men, makes 
them see there is something worth wishing for and some- 
thing that can be struggled for and something worth dying 
for. 

So with the battle against sin ; God puts a new heart of 
hope in us in dealing with that. Ah, who can look at life 
and shut his eyes to the awful fact of sin? Cruelty, sen- 
suality, lust, intemperance and oppression, hateful fiends 
all of them, and many more, with malodorous smell upon 
their garments. What is it to hope? To shut your eyes 
and say there are no fiends ! to look at these full-grown 
enormities and say they are but good in the making? to 
say there is no harm and wrong in the world, only seeds 
that by and by will grow to goodness but now smell badly 
and look badly ? Is that to hope ! This it is to hope : to 



246 SAVED BY HOPE. 

say I have something better to do in the world than to be 
happy J I have something better to do in the world than to 
be comfortable ; here are enemies worth the fighting ; I 
want to battle them ; that is the wish. Here at my side is 
a strength-Giver who will enable me to master them ; that 
is the expectation. I will fight on till sin is killed, for I 
have Eternity before me and God behind me ; that is the 
hope. Not to say, I think I am well, therefore I am well ; 
not to say, I believe I am righteous, therefore I am right- 
eous ; but to say, I have a new wish ; it is the wish to 
bring purity where there is corruption and honor where 
there is shame, and self-control where there is sensuality, to 
make cities that are pure and churches that are brave and 
a nation that is honorable and men everywhere who are 
white-winged and lustrous of brow, and God helping us it 
can be done. Oh, if we really did but have the wish and 
behind it the expectation it would be true. To him that 
believeth all things are possible. 

This hope of the Gospel gives a new meaning to indus- 
try. Take hope out of work, it is dull drudgery, and the 
man goes on with his work as a bit of machinery, with as 
little life in his heart and with not so much life in his muscle 
as the engine has. That is the difference between slave 
labor and free labor. Men say the slave was as well-fed, 
was as well-housed, as well-clad, as well taken care of as he 
is to-day. It is not true, but if it were true it would make 
no difference. Then he was working without hope ; then 
he had no wish to be industrious, and went to his task only 
under the impulse of a fear, driven by the lash ; then he 
had no expectation of accomplishing anything ; whether he 
worked or did not work, he would be equally well fed, well 
clad, well housed, well taken care of, and he was idle and 
lazy — so would you and I be. But liberty came and put a 
new desire in his heart — a desire to own land ; a desire to 



SAVED BY HOPE. 247 

have savings in the bank ; a desire to have a two-room 
cottage instead of a one-room cottage ; a desire to have a 
little home he could call his own ; a desire to be somebody 
and to do something ; then liberty said : You can ; it is 
hard work, you will have discouragement, you will have ob- 
stacles in your way, but go on, you can be somebody, you 
can have something, you can learn something, you can be 
a man ; and to-day the black man is laboring with hope 
in his heart and in his life, with a new desire and a new 
aspiration and a new expectation, and the drudgery has gone 
out of work. Oh, into how many a married woman's life 
comes drudgery where ought to be joy ! She wanted to 
please her husband ; she wanted to have his love and his 
approbation; she counted on it; it was her only wage. 
She could earn more as a professional nurse, and quite as 
much as a nursemaid or a cook, as she is earning as a wife, 
if that were all. But she wanted love, and the wages are 
not paid. She gets criticism in plenty, but never a word of 
approbation, never a word of thanks, scarcely the signs and 
tokens of the common courtesy that her husband as a 
gentleman would pay to other women ; and gradually the 
expectation of pleasing him dies out, and gradually even 
the wish to please him follows out of the door after the 
expectation, and she goes on living her life of drudgery be- 
cause the hope has died out of it. You know this. Now 
Christ comes with this message to men : Work — it is not 
from fear ; it is not for food or clothing or shelter ; these 
are the mere incidents ; work means service, and service 
means love, and love is the highest and greatest thing in 
the world. He comes to be the son of a carpenter ; He 
does the common things of life : He calls common laborers 
about Him; He beckons and the fishermen leave their 
boats, and He says, Follow me and you shall catch men ; 
He puts a new dignity into life ; He sends forth His great 



248 SAVED BY HOPE. 

apostle the tent-maker. Christianity went to freemen, to 
slaves, to men who never had thought life was worth living ; 
and carried His message ; There is something you can do 
with your industry, be not eye-servants, be not men- 
pleasers; remember that you have a Master in heaven; 
remember that it matters httle for you whether you are a 
slave or a freeman since you are working for Him and He 
does appreciate and does pay love's wages. Have you ever 
seen the dust in the country road, when suddenly the sun 
breaks through the clouds and shines upon it, and all the 
dust is luminous and turned to gold? So this message 
shines upon this dusty highway of ours, and all the drudg- 
ery of toil turns golden when life and love and hope illu- 
minate it. 

Hope saves from sorrow, not by taking sorrow off, but by 
giving sorrow a new significance, by putting into the heart 
of men a desire for sorrow and an expectation to accom- 
plish something by sorrow. A paradox? Not at all. 
You remember that when Hobson was starting on that per- 
ilous expedition of his on the Merrimac, which he and 
every man who went with him expected could only end in 
death, he called for half a dozen men and there were four 
hundred that volunteered ; four hundred men who wanted 
to die, four hundred men who wanted to be wounded and 
suffer, four hundred men whose names would not go into 
the gazette and who would not be recognized (can you re- 
call the name of a single one except Hobson himself?), four 
hundred men who wanted to be where the danger and the 
peril was because they had the heart of heroism in them. 
There have been men who have sat at the receipt of cus- 
toms during all this war and watched how they could make 
money out of it, how they could coin the blood and the 
tears of their country into gold and put it in their pockets. 
They also are not gazetted in life, but they are gazetted in 



^ SAVED BY HOPE. 249 

hell ; by and by their names shall be known and their dis- 
honor flaunted in the face of all the universe ; and there 
are other men and women (one of them told her story last 
Friday night in the Plymouth lecture-room), who expected 
no mark of honor, no reward, no office, no brevetting, who 
simply begged the chance to go and nurse the sick and 
care for the wounded, and watch over the suffering, and 
share their privations with them. This is being saved from 
sorrow by hope. Not saying^ Oh, if I hope in God, He 
will never let any tears come, or if I do sorrow, by and by 
I shall be free from it ; it is this : I follow after if that I 
may know the power of His resurrection, that I may have 
fellowship with His sufferings, that I may be conformed 
unto His death. Do you remember how in the primitive 
church the church itself had to make decree in order to 
prevent Christians from seeking martyrdom? Oh, what 
man is there who is a man, or what woman, who would 
stand in a world of suffering and see tears flowing from 
others' eyes, and say : Let my eyes be dry ; who would 
walk in a procession where other men are carrying heavy 
burdens and say. Let me stand erect, unburdened; who 
want to live where others are in pain and go unanguished 
from the cradle to the grave ! Hope is the desire to suffer 
and the expectation that by that suffering something will 
be done for the kingdom of God and the well-being of 
men. It is covetousness for Christ. This hope, this ex- 
pectation, this desire, kindled by God, is sustained and 
supported by faith in Him. From a nursery one brings 
a little switch a few inches long. What is that? An oak. 
That an oak? Well, yes, it is the beginning of an oak, but 
leave it lying there on the table and presently it would dry 
and be good only for the fire ; but plant it in the ground 
and it will grow to the stature of an oak. Take this man 
up and root him in God and no man can tell to what he 



250 SAVED BY HOPE. 

will grow. That is the message. *^ I cannot ?" You and 
God can ; there is nothing that you and God cannot do to- 
gether. When He enters your life, points out to you your 
duty, calls you to your mission, lays on you your burden, 
crowns you with suffering. He stands at your side and says 
to you. Together you and I can. " I can do all things 
through Him that strengtheneth me.'* 

Let a man really believe this ; let him believe that the 
time is coming when the dread of sin will flee away ; let 
him live in the belief that the time is coming when God's 
kingdom shall come in earth as it is in heaven and God's 
will shall be done here as there ; let him live in the belief 
in the time coming when every man shall have mastership 
of himself, and shall know no other mastery, when, there- 
fore, sensuality and vice in all its forms shall be banished ; 
let him live in the hope of that picture which I read from 
Isaiah this morning, or in the hope of the fulfilment of 
other pictures strewn all through the Bible from Genesis to 
Revelation ; let him live in the faith of Mrs. Browning : 

'' After Adam, work was curse ; 
The natural creature labors, sweats and frets. 
But, after Christ, work turns a privilege, 
And henceforth, one with our humanity, 
The Six-day Worker working still in us, 
Has called us freely to work on with Him 
In high companionship. So happiest ! 
I count that Heaven itself is only work 
To a surer issue " — 

let him live with this conception and it will be strange if a 
new desire to have some share in it is not kindled in his 
heart. 



God of hope, fill us with Thine own spirit of hopeful- 



SAVED BY HOPE. 251 

ness, that we, not knowing Thy resources, may trust in 
Thee and in them, desire for ourselves what Thou dost de- 
sire for us, and be sure for ourselves, as Thou art sure for 
us, that if we fight with Thee we shall be conquerors and 
more than conquerors, through Him that loved us. Amen. 



THE LIVING GOD.* 

Then Peter said unto them^ ^^ Repent^ and be baptized every one of you 
in the name of Jesus Christy for the remission of sinsy and ye shall 
receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. For the promise is unto you, and 
to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the 
Lord our God shall calV^ 

(Acts, a. 38, 39). 

The Bible may be characterized as a succession of epiph- 
anies — that is manifestations of God on the earth. He 
appears to Abraham; calls him out of the land of igno- 
rance and superstition ; appears to him sometimes in secret 
spiritual conferences, sometimes in visions of the night. 
He appears to Joseph in dreams, telling him what to do 
and encouraging him in doing it. He appears to Moses, 
and talks with him face to face upon the mountain top. 
He appears to little Samuel, making his bed in the Holy 
of Holies by the Ark of the Covenant. He appears to 
David, a shepherd boy on the hills of Judea, in the caves 
of those same hills while he is exiled from the persecuting 
king, and later, even in his sins, to rebuke him. He ap- 
pears to Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and Moses, 
and Hosea, bringing them their messages, which they bear 
to the Children of Israel. He appears in clearer and 
clearer visions, and in more and more spiritual vision, at 
first in dreams, then in human guise as the angel of the 

* Preached in Plymouth Church, Sunday morning, Nov. 27, 1898, 
on the occasion of the presentation of his resignation. 

252 



THE LIVING GOD, 253 

Lord, later as an inward experience interpreted by the 
human voice. 

All these epiphanies, these manifestations of God to 
men, lead up to the great epiphany, the great manifesta- 
tion, the coming of God to dwell with man in human form 
— Himself a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. 
The Word of God manifested in flesh we have seen and 
handled, says John. I think that the great majority of 
Christians believe that the climax of the long ascending 
series of appearances of God is at Bethlehem and at Cal- 
vary ; that this, the climax, was reached ; and that since then 
we have been, as it were, descending the hill ; since then 
we have been departing from the glory; since then we 
have had to look back over the centuries for our epiphany. 

But this is not the testimony of the New Testament ; for 
it declares that this long ascending series of manifestations 
of God, and this in some sense supreme manifestation of 
Him in human flesh, is itself the preparation for that 
superior one, that in which we live, the manifestation and 
disclosure of God in the spiritual experiences of men. It 
is for your benefit, says Christ, that I am going away ; for 
if I do not go away the Holy Spirit cannot come to you. 
The very essence of this declaration is that it is better for 
the world that the manifestation of God should not be in 
visible form, should not be tangible, should not be such as 
we can seewith our eyes and handle with our hands — but 
that it should be spiritual. It is better, because, among 
other reasons, it can be universal. It is better than any 
succession of epiphanies through human manifestations, be- 
cause they would almost inevitably degenerate into idol 
worshi^D — in man worship. So long as God dwelt in human 
guise upon the earth, in Palestine, so long as that was the 
great manifestation of Him, only a few men could be at 
His side, could hear His words, could look upon His life 



254 THE LIVING GOD. 

and share it with him. The ointment was in a bottle ; very 
precious the ointment and very precious the bottle; the 
crucifixion broke the bottle and the perfume fills the 
world. 

So when the day of Pentecost comes, there comes with 
it this interpretation of its meaning by Peter : Ye shall re- 
ceive the Holy Spirit. The promise is to you, and to your 
descendants, and to all those that are afar off ; to you Jews, 
to your descendants in Judaism, and to all pagan or 
heathen people as well. It is the promise of the universal 
dwelling of God in the hearts and lives of His children. 
One travels across what are known as the Bad Lands of 
the West ; a long, treeless road ; the hot sun heating the 
sand, and the sand adding its heat to the atmosphere; 
great and various colored rocks Hfting themselves up in all 
manner of castellated forms in wonderful beauty, and here 
and there a tree or a Httle oasis of green grass where there 
is some running stream or spring. But by and by, after the 
long day, the traveler begins to approach the Eastern 
border of the Bad Lands ; the trees grow more numerous, 
the grass grows thicker, and presently he finds himself in 
a garden full of luxurious vegetation. So, in the olden 
times, men traveled through the world, as though it were a 
desert. There were prophets who were oases in the desert ; 
here and there men who heard the voice of God, felt the 
presence of God, were stirred by the influences of God, 
and reported to their less happy fellows what they heard 
and saw and felt. But, for the most part, men lived with- 
out the knowledge of God ; they had not yet reached the 
moral and spiritual development in which the knowledge 
of God was possible. As spiritual development increased 
the appreciation of God increased. The numbers that 
knew Him, realized Him, rejoiced in Him, increased. 
With the coming of Christ there was still larger vision, and 



THE LIVING GOD. 255 

now, if we did but know it, we have passed the desert, we 
have passed the oases, we have come into that epoch in 
which all the children of God may be prophets of God, 
priests unto Him, kings ruling by His power, prophets 
listening to His word and interpreting His word to others. 

Jesus Christ has told us what is the voice, what the mes- 
sage of this indwelling, universal Spirit. It has sometimes 
seemed to me unfortunate that the word Comforter is so 
universally used as the name for the Holy Spirit, for we 
have come to think of comfort as identical with consola- 
tion, and to think that the Spirit of God has come only to 
wipe tears away from the eyes in times of sorrow. But the 
word Comforter, as you know, properly means Strength- 
bringer, and the Greek word, of which it is a translation, 
Paraclete, means one who hears another's call. So the 
Greek idea is, God is now so near that any man may call 
Him and He will hear the call j God is now so interpreted 
to men through Jesus Christ that any man may look upon 
Him, any man may be a Moses and see God in the mount- 
ain top, any man may hear His voice, for wherever God 
speaks and man listens is the Holy of Holies, any man may 
receive the vision that Ezekiel received, any man may 
walk with God and know His presence. Or if you turn to 
the English word the meaning is this : Wherever there is 
weakness, whenever there is any need of any kmd, there the 
Strength-bringer stands to give the strength and the inspi- 
ration that is needed. 

When He has come, says Christ, He will convince the 
world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment. Of 
sin, because they believe not on me ; of righteousness, be- 
cause I go to my Father and you see me no more ; of 
judgment, because the prince of this world is judged. He 
will convince, not the prophets, not the priests, not the 
great men. He will convince the world. ^' He will convince 



256 



THE LIVING GOD. 



the world of sin." Men ask, if inspiration is universal, why 
not a better Bible now than in the olden time. No man 
will ever write, I think, a profounder expression of the 
sense of sin than he who wrote the 51st Psalm. I suppose 
myriads on myriads of men and women have found in that 
51st Psalm the expression of their experience, though they 
never could have uttered it. No man will ever write a 
broader, sweeter and diviner expression of the Eternal 
Goodness than is written in the 103d Psalm, but myriads 
on myriads of men and women have found, as Whittier 
found, in that 103d Psalm, the inspiration to a better un- 
derstanding of Him who like a father pitieth us his children. 
The Spirit of God working with the children of men has 
made universal the experience which in Bible literature is 
the experience of a few saints and leaders. ^^ He will con- 
vince the world of righteousness because I go to my 
Father.'' He will show us what the true ideal of life is. 
Compare the ideals of life afforded by Christ with the ideals 
afforded by the Old Testament. Read in Judges the 
account of a God who tells men to destroy the wicked that 
they may destroy wickedness, and then compare with that 
the ideal afforded by Christ, who tells us to destroy wicked- 
ness by loving and pitying and redeeming the wicked, and 
put these two ideals side by side, both of them inspired by 
the same sense of justice and truth, but the one saying, 
Hate the evil, the other saying, By love cure the evil. The 
Spirit is convincing the world of the truth and beauty of 
Christ's ideal, so that through the ministry of God in the 
hearts of men they are coming to understand the true ideal 
of righteousness, the ideal that is reflected in the glory of 
Christ Jesus our Lord. " He will convince us of judgment, 
because the prince of this world is judged." Not that by 
and by God will sit on His great white throne and call the 
prince of this world before Him ; he is judged here and 



THE LIVING GOD. 257 

now. If Christ and Barabbas were to stand before a great 
gathering of people in this city of New York, there would 
still be men who would cry, Give to us Barabbas, and there 
would still be men who would cry. Crucify Him ! Crucify 
Him ! but there would not be one united voice going up 
from the same great multitude, Release to us Barabbas and 
crucify the Christ, while they that loved the Christ stood 
with silent lips, dumb, and not daring to protest. Our 
Christ cannot be crucified to-day and Barabbas released 
without a battle, for the world has learned how to judge as 
it never knew in the olden time, because God is working in 
the lives and on the hearts of the children of men. 

Some men there are who know this influence, perceive 
it, rejoice in it, and some men know it not and still are 
moved and stirred by it. There are some plants growing 
in the sunshine, drinking in the sunshine, reflecting its 
glories from all their petals, and others that are still be- 
neath the light, groping toward the sun they do not see, 
and yet as truly warmed and vivified as those that are in the 
light. So there are men who take the sunshine into their 
hearts and reflect it in their lives, and say, I know this is 
the sun, I am living in it ; and there are other men who 
grope in the darkness, but are struggling toward the light 
and know it not ; and the same voice speaks to both, the 
same emotions stir in both, the same desire for a higher life 
is in both. One knows that life is given to him by the 
love of God, and the other knows not whence it comes, but 
it is God in the one as it is God in the other. One man 
prepares to speak to his congregation; as he prepares, 
thoughts come to his mind that he knows come to him 
from Robert Browning, from Carlyle, from Whittier, from 
Isaiah; to another man as he prepares for his sermon like 
thoughts come ; he knows they come to him from his past 
reading and study, but he docs not know whence they come. 
^7 



258 THE LIVING GOD. 

So there are some men who know the companion who walks 
by their side, and other men who walk in the same path, 
are stirred by the same emotions, moved the same high 
principles and high purposes, and know not by whom they 
are moved or how ; but with the one as with the other God 
is walking. " Doubtless Thou art our Father, though we 
are ignorant of Thee." He knows His own, though His 
own know not Him. 

I think to a great many Christians what is known as the 
doctrine of the Holy Spirit is a mystical and unmeaning 
doctrine. They can understand the Ten Commandments 
very well ; they can understand somewhat the incarnation 
of a Christ living on the earth in human form ; but the 
notion of a Holy Spirit is meaningless to them. I met the 
other day with Dwight L. Moody's definition of the Holy 
Spirit ; it is not quite orthodox, but it is fine. The Holy 
Spirit, said Mr. Moody, is God at work. God at work ! 
And this is the message of Peter here. God is at work in 
the world, and God v/ho has spoken through intermediaries 
in the past will now speak directly, and you shall all take 
Him as you are able to take Him ; the promise is to you 
and your descendants and to those that are afar off. 

Therefore it is that the Church is the Church of the 
Living God. It is a church not merely bearing witness to 
a great historic past — though it does that ; it is a church 
not merely of philanthropic men, brought together in order 
that they may accomplish something for their fellow-men — 
though it is that ; it is the body of Christ ; it is the organ- 
ism in which the Spirit of God pre-eminently and pecul- 
iarly dwells and through which the Spirit of God manifests 
Himself. So all the various utterances of the Church are 
in some true measure the utterances of this indwelling Spirit. 
As the Spirit in man makes him one, whether his hand is 
working with the plane or with the pen, whether his eye 



THE LIVING GOD. 259 

is looking through telescope or microscope, whether he is 
reciting poetry or talking in conversation, so in this Church 
one Spirit speaks, whether it speaks in the old Jewish ritual 
or in the splendid Roman service, in the Episcopal Cathe- 
dral, or in the Congregational meeting, or in the Quaker 
silence. It is the same Spirit in the same body working in 
various forms of the same great life. So in this Church of 
Christ are many gifts, says Paul, but one Spirit. I remem- 
ber — though I cannot quote it as I would — Dr. Raymond 
once bringing this truth out in a prayer-meeting talk on 
that prayer in Ephesians, that we may be filled with all the 
fulness of God, with the added ascription. Unto Him be 
glory in the Church, by Christ Jesus, throughout all ages, 
world without end. The Church in all its varied manifesta- 
tions is the incarnation of the same Spirit that was incar- 
nated in the one man Christ Jesus. No one man can show 
forth the glory of this indwelling Spirit, but all combined 
can. So God says to one. Lie on a bed of sickness and 
show the world what the patience of God means ; and to 
another, Enter into the battle of life and show what the 
heroism of Gad means ; and to another. Enter into business 
and show what is the divine ideal of honesty ; and to an- 
other, Sit on the bench, and show the world what justice 
means ; and to another. Stand in the pulpit and interpret 
what divine truth is ; and the minister, no more than the 
judge, or the merchant, or the man of affairs, or the invalid, 
is showing forth the glory of God. We have a great organ 
here, and the wind comes blowing through its pipes, and 
you hear now the flute, now the diapason, and now the 
great sub-bass, but it is the same wind blowing through all 
the various pipes. So the one Spirit of God moving on the 
hearts of men speaks different voices in different dialects. 
Stiil the miracle of Pentecost is continued when each in his 
own tongue heard the glory of God interpreted to him. 



26o THE LIVING GOD. 

There are men in this congregation every Sabbath morning 
who could not follow a mystic, nor a poet, nor a prophet, 
nor a man of spiritual genius, but they can follow a man of 
integrity, a man of sterling purpose, a man of steadfast 
earnestness, a man of practical common sense, and who to 
practical common sense mates the highest and the divinest 
ideals of living. And so every man may hear in his own 
dialect the glory of God spoken through the Church. 

And this is what makes the Church one ; for it is one 
Church; the Church of Moses, and of Elijah, and of David, 
and of Isaiah, and of James, and of Paul, the Church of 
Augustine, and of Wesley, and of Edwards, and of Beecher. 
It is one Church. Why? Not because all these various 
men have the same spirit ; they are very different, their in- 
tellectual conceptions are different, their ideals are different, 
their methods are different, often they have warred one 
with another ; but in and through them all and back of 
them all is the one Spirit who controls and reveals Himself 
through them. I was reading last night a touching story. 
An Italian convict is at last, after t^venty-six years, released 
from prison. He starts toward his home; he wonders 
whether his wife will welcome him or be sorry to meet him ; he 
wonders whether his daughter, now married, and with her 
babe in her arms, will remember him. As the time comes 
near and the train draws closer and closer to the station his 
heart beats with alternate fear and hope ; the two people 
who are with him in that car see him get out, and they see 
a poor, bent, old peasant woman, with the lines of care 
across her face and the gray upon her hair, standing there 
and looking earnestly along the train — but she sees no one 
she knows ; they see him looking hither and yon upon the 
platform, casting his eyes on her — and not knowing her. 
But presently his face lights up ; he sees a young woman ; 
in her are the lineaments of the wife whom twenty-six years 



THE LIVING GOD. 261 

ago he left. He goes to her, he calls her by name, she 
springs to him, takes him by the hand, leads him to her, 
the mother and the wife ; and when the two look into each 
other's eyes they know one another. And the story ends 
with a picture of wife and daughter walking down the road 
with him, while he carries his granddaughter in his arms, 
to their simple home. Why is it that he recognizes in the 
face so entirely changed the wife of twenty-six years ago? 
The features have changed, the body has changed, there is 
not a single particle of the physical material that was there 
then that is there now. But the spirit is the same ; it is 
the same wife after all. And so the Church remains 
through all the ages, because back of all the changes of 
form, back of all the changes of personality, there is one 
Spirit. I do not mean that all these men and women of 
all these ages are alike in spirit ; I mean that in them all, 
manifesting itself through them all, speaking through them 
all, as truly in them as your spirit is in your body, and my 
spirit in my body, is the one Spirit of God that stirs and in- 
spires and encourages and uplifts and redeems. 

What is Plymouth Church? The building? This is the 
third you have worshiped in. The people? There is not, 
I believe, a single one of the founders of Plymouth Church 
living in the church now ; and in these pews scarcely one 
who was here the first ten years of its existence. But in 
this church is the same Living Spirit of God that dwelt in 
it more than fifty years ago. Men come, men go, men live 
and speak and pass away, but the church is the same be- 
cause the same Spirit of God dwells in it. A hierarchy of 
priests and bishops does not make a Church — this is the 
Church : The indwelling of the Living Spirit of God in 
the organization which is trying to do His will. Mr. 
Beecher dies, but the church is not rent nor broken, be- 
cause it was not the spirit of Mr. Beecher, it was the Spirit 



262 THE LIVING GOD. ; 

of God in the church. And when the thne comes, as now 
very soon it must come, when I, your present pastoi, whom 
you have nurtured and supported and loved, and who loves 
you, God knows — when the time comes, as it soon must 
come, w^hen he must step out of the office to which you 
have called him and enter again into the ranks and be a 
layman, the church will not be changed, the church will 
not lose its leader or its life, for the life of the Church is 
the Living God and the Leader of the Church is the Christ 
that walks before it. 

I have been very reluctant — God knows how reluctant 
— to reach the conclusion which I must now announce to 
you — the conclusion that the time is very close at hand 
when I must lay aside the leadership with which you have 
honored me, and take the place of a private in the army. 
I cannot tell you \\ith what wrestlings and resistance and 
regrets I have been forced to it. I must read my statement 
of the reasons which have forced me to this conclusion 
lest I should not be able were I to speak, to do so with un- 
broken utterance. 

When eleven years ago I was asked to supply the pulpit 
of Plymouth Church, it was frankly given as one reason 
for the selection that my duties as editor of the '^ Christian 
Union " would absolutely prevent me from being regarded 
as a candidate for the pastorate ; and when, four months 
later, I was asked to accept the title and office of acting 
pastor, it was only that the church might be properly rep- 
resented in church councils and similar ecclesiastical 
gatherings. It was not until the close of the season. 
May, 1888, that it was deemed possible by either the 
church or myself that I could fulfil the duties of the pas- 
torate while continuing to fulfil those of editor ; nor did I 
accept your imitation until the proposition had been sub- 
mitted to my editorial associates and its acceptance had 



THE LIVING GOD. 263 

received their cordial approbation. During the ten years 
which have elapsed since the final call was extended to me 
and I entered upon the pastorate of this church it would 
have been impossible for me to fulfil the duties which the 
two offices involve but for the great consideration exercised 
by my co-workers in both the church and the newspaper. 

You have not demanded pastoral calHng ; you have pro- 
vided efficient and untiring assistance in the administrative 
work of the church ; you have co-operated heartily in that 
work, supporting it generously by your contributions and 
your services ; you have given open-minded consideration 
to every plan proposed involving departure from former 
methods ; you have accorded me long periods of summer 
rest; you have loyally sustained my Hberty of utterance 
whether you have agreed with the utterances or not, and 
many of you have come considerable distances at no little 
sacrifice of convenience in order to support the church in 
its regular services by your attendance. My associates in 
" The Outlook '^ have shown equal consideration by relieving 
me of all office detail. 

Nevertheless, if not the work, certainly the responsibility 
in both fields has sensibly increased. The activities of 
Plymouth Church have grown somewhat greater and ma- 
terially more complex. There are great advantages in preach- 
ing in a pulpit to which past history has given a national 
character ; but he who occupies such a pulpit cannot escape 
the obligations involved in the fact that his utterances are 
always liable to be reported far and wide, and taken as an 
expression not only of the church but of that unorganized 
party of progress with which this church has always been 
associated. The obligations involved in the editorial office 
have increased even more. 

The growing difficulty and complexity of the problems 
of our time — industrial, political, ethical and sjuritual — the 



264 THE LIVING GOD. 

changed character of the paper, changed to adapt its 
ministry to the larger life, and its increasing constituency 
have all combined to add to the responsibihties involved in 
the duty of directing the utterances and controlling the 
policy of such a journal in such a time as ours. To add the 
further duty of supervising the spiritual industry of a church 
which with its two branches is scarcely less than three 
churches, and the preaching in this age of singularly com- 
mingled spiritual doubt and spiritual activity to such a 
congregation as gathers here every Sabbath day, and to the 
wider congregation which listens to the echoes of this pul- 
pit, is — to this conclusion I have been very reluctantly forced 
— more than my strength is any longer equal to. It is not 
that your demands or those of my editorial associates are 
excessive. You have both asked less than you had a right 
to ask — the one of its senior pastor, the other of its editor- 
in-chief. It is with the demands of my own conscience I 
must reckon. I have endeavored to avoid the inevitable 
conclusion, or at least to delay it by abandoning other 
work and by laying on my associates in these two fields of 
Christian activity all responsibilities which do not neces- 
sarily inhere in the office of chosen leader. I have with- 
drawn from the lecture field, refused all invitations to sit 
on boards and committees of philanthropic and Christian 
societies and have discontinued literary work to which I 
had pledged myself ; and my occasional absences have been 
rather a relief from the strain of a too continuous work 
than an addition to it. 

Perhaps, so reluctant am I to sever my pastoral connec- 
tion with Plymouth Church, I should still have hesitated 
and delayed had not a warning been given me this fall which 
scarcely needed the doctor's interpretation. He tells me 
frankly that I am using up vital energies faster than nature 
supplies them ; he imperatively declares that I must pre- 



THE LIVING GOD. 265 

pare to discontinue the attempt, though made with all 
possible reserve and every aid, to fulfil the duties of two 
such offices, either one of which would be quite sufficient 
to tax my fullest and best energies, and he leaves me no 
option but to withdraw from the pastoral work and devote 
myself to the equally responsible but quieter work of the 
pen. 

I have therefore no choice but to resign into your hands 
the office with which for these ten years you have honored 
me. It is hardly necessary to say that it is my earnest 
desire that the result should be the least immediate injury 
and the greatest ultimate benefit to the church I love. It 
is not necessary that my work with the church should im- 
mediately cease, though it will not be possible for me to 
continue it beyond the present season. Within that limit 
I leave to the officers of the church, or to such special 
committee as the church may appoint, to determine the 
time when this resignation shall take effect. 

I can never resume the labors of a pastorate ; but I hope 
in occasional ministries to carry the gospel of God's love in 
Jesus Christ our Lord to other congregations, who perhaps 
need it more than you because it is less famihar to them. 
Even inspired by this hope, the decision to retire from Plym- 
outh pulpit would be for me very difficult, were it not 
that duty is never difficult when it is clear ; and this duty is 
very clear. But though not difficult, it is as painful to me 
as I beHeve it will be to you. 

I love Plymouth Church. Here forty years ago I first 
learned that God is love, not merely law ; here I first re- 
ceived the illumination which comes from the recognition 
of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ ; here I re- 
ceived the inspiration which renewed my earlier desire to 
enter the Christian ministry. When, eleven years ago, I 
came back here, it was as a man comes back to the home 



266 THE LIVING GOD. 

of his boyhood. No other church ever was or ever can be 

to me what Plymouth Church is and has been. In my 
preaching of the gospel of faith and hope and love I have 
but interpreted in words the spirit which ever abides 
within these walls. If I have ministered to you, much 
more have you ministered to me. Your faith has clarified 
mine ; your hope encouraged mine ; your love has inspired 
me in loving. With far better reason than Paul had in 
writing to the Romans, '^ I thank my God through Jesus 
Christ, for you all, that your faith is spoken of throughout 
the whole world." Often shall I ^^long to see you, that I 
may impart unto you some spiritual gift, that is, that I may 
be comforted by the mutual faith both of you and of me/' 
My love be with you all in Christ Jesus. 



OUT OF THE PAST.' 

" And Jesus said. So is the kingdom of God^ as if a man should cast 
seed upon the earth ; and should sleep and rise night and day ^ a7id the 
seed should spring up a7id grow, he hioweth not how.'''' 

{Markiv. 26, 27.) 

The kingdom of God, then, is a growth. It begins with 
a seed \ it goes on to the harvest. In this growth are three 
necessary elements : first, the beginning, the point of de- 
parture ; second, a goal, a termination to which the prog- 
ress is directed ; and, third, the pathway between the be- 
ginning and the goal, leading from the one to the other. 
This is the law of progress in all things — a terminus a quo, 
a terminus ad quem, and a pathway between the two. You 
cannot have progress, regular, systematic, symmetrical, 
without these three. You may break the line of juncture 
between the past and the future ; then you break the prog- 
ress and must begin it over again. You may cut down the 
tree, and from the root there may start a fresh tree, but it 
is a new one. He who remains in the present, anchored to 
it, does not progress. He who cuts himself apart from the 
present does not know progress. He only understands the 
law of progress who begins with the present, utilizing the 
past, and proceeds out of that past and present toward the 
proposed future. 

Next summer, on the seashore, you may find a sea-ane- 
mone clinging to the rock. I am told that even a sea-ane- 
mone does sometimes separate himself from tlie rock and 

1 Sermon ])rcached in Appleton Chapel, Ifarvard College, Sinulay 
evening, March 26, 1899. 

267 



268 OUT OF THE PAST. 

Start off on a voyage of exploration ; but as I have seen 
them they stand glued to the rock and take the food which 
chance sends to them. There is no progress in such a 
creature. You may watch by a pool next summer the little 
'* skippers " on the water ; you go there at nine o'clock in 
the morning and they are skipping back and forth ; you 
go there in the afternoon at four o'clock and they are still 
skipping back and forth. They have motion, but no prog- 
ress. The sea-anemone has neither motion nor progress. 
Movement is not progress. 

In national history this is abundantly illustrated. Spain 
was anchored to the past ; she was bound by her own tra- 
ditions j she knew no progress. If you will read Borrow 's 
^* Bible in Spain," you will get a pretty good picture of the 
hotels, the methods of transit, and the customs of to-day. 
Spain had nineteenth-century guns and sixteenth-century 
men behind them ; we know what came. On the other 
hand, France broke with her past, cut sharply asunder from 
it. She brought together a convention of men, who were, 
on the whole, patriotic and prophetic and desired well for 
their country ; but they sundered her from all the traditions of 
the past, and it was many years before she could begin again a 
new course of progress. Great Britain has held to her tra- 
ditions, but not been tied by them. She has made her 
future grow out of her past, and has kept the connection 
between the past and the future ; and the history of Great 
Britain has been a history of continuous and, on the whole, 
of almost unbroken progress. 

This is the simple truth I want to put before you this 
evening, with some illustrations and applications. 

America has turned a page in her National history. 
What shall she write on the new page ? She may, on the 
one hand, say nothing which has not been written in the 
past. She may bind herself by traditions of the past ; she 



OUT OF THE PAST. 269 

may try to be in the future exactly what she was in the 
past j she may try to make a sea-anemone of herself — and 
she will not succeed. On the other hand, she may break 
asunder from that past entirely. She may say, " Thus far 
we have grown rich and strong and prosperous by principles of 
liberty, and self-government, and now we will take a new 
track and see what we can do by principles of imperialism 
and despotism.'^ Neither the one nor the other course 
will give her progress. We are not to be bound by the tra- 
ditions of the past. Traditions are not manacles to bind 
us, but are harness, for us to use in the forward movement. 
There is no more reason why the counsels which were ap- 
propriate in the beginning of the nineteenth century should 
bind us in the beginning of the twentieth than why the 
creeds that were the best thought of the seventeenth cen- 
tury should bind us in the nineteenth. We must do our 
own thinking, and guide our own ship by our own wisdom. 
But we must not break away from the past, and we must 
learn how to develop the future out of the past. 

And the Nation has a right, young men, to look to a 
great university like this, and to the young men who are 
coming forth from this university, to guide in the progress 
of the future. It has a right to look to you to tell the Na- 
tion what shall be in the larger life that lies before it. The 
country needs leaders. It needs them sadly. It is glad to 
welcome them — so glad that it takes them, not infrequently, 
without asking whence they have come or whither they 
lead. It is right for us to expect that you will be prepared 
to take your share in leading the Nation forth to a greater 
future, without breaking the continuity of its history or 
abandoning the principles which have made it great. 

This is true in the realm of industry. There are men 
who seem to imagine that the present industrial system 
has always existed, that the so-called capitalistic or wages 



270 OUT OF THE PAST. 

system has come down to us from the days of the Garden of 
Eden. It is just about one century old. There are other 
men who would wipe off the slate all that the experience of 
the past has taught us, and create a new social order ; and 
generally the man who wants to build the State afresh and 
create a new industrial order is the man who cannot take 
care of his own wife and children. What we need, and 
what we have a right to ask, of a great university and of its 
young men, is to show us how neither to be bound by the 
traditions of the past in the realm of industry nor to break 
away from them. " In every to-day walks a to-morrow.'* 

We have a right to look to you, young men, to tell us 
what is the to-morrow that walks in to-day. Not to create a 
to-morrow out of your own imaginings, nor to insist that we 
shall always live in to-day ; but to find the to-morrow that is 
in to-day, and to teach us how to find it for ourselves. 
Whether you are preachers in the pulpit or administrators 
in law or conductors of business, it is yours to show, not how 
we can maintain the past unbroken, not how we can break 
from the past to enter into an ideal that you have invented 
for us, but how out of that past we can develop a noble 
future. And as out of slavery feudalism, and as out of 
feudaUsm the wages system, so out of the wages system the 
larger industrial liberty that Hes before us must be developed. 

This is true in the realm of ecclesiasticism. Did the 
apostolic Church have bishops? If so that does not 
require us to have them. Did the apostohc Church not 
have bishops ? That is no reason why we should not have 
them. The methods of administering the Church in a 
province of the ancient Roman Empire may not be the best 
methods of administering the Church in this nineteenth 
century and in this great republic. We are to find the best 
method of Church administration that we can find. Did 
the apostohc Church baptize men by immersion? I rather 



OUT OF THE PAST. 2/1 

think so ; but it does not follow that in a country of blizzards 
we must always baptize people by immersion. The method 
of administering a rite that was good for a tropical country, 
and with garments easily laid aside, may not be the best in 
our time. And yet, if we are not bound by the past, neither 
are we to discard it, to throw overboard all rites and cere- 
monies, all the experience which the Church has garnered in 
the past, and say, ^^ Go to! we will create a new order and a 
new rite. " We are to learn how, out of the past, to evolve 
an instrumentation useful for to-day. 

So in theology. I meet men who want to wipe off from 
the page of history all the creeds that ever wxre constructed. 
They want to abolish the Westminster Confession, and the 
Thirty-nine Articles, and the Heidelberg Catechism, and 
the Creed of Pius IX., and the Nicene Creed, and the 
Apostles' Creed and begin again. If I could think that for 
nineteen centuries thoughtful, earnest, devout men had 
been wrestling with the great problems of human life, 
wondering who God is and how He rules this world, and what 
we are and what we are here for and what lies in the future, 
and that in all these centuries they had found out nothing, 
I should give it up and be an agnostic. The creeds of the 
future must grow out of the creeds of the past. But a 
creed is not a rock to which your ship is anchored, while it 
swings back and forth in the tide and the barnacles gather 
on its bottom. The creed is a seed planted and out of 
that is to grow a nobler and a better creed. No new theology 
is worth having which cuts asunder from the past. And no 
theology is worth the having which remains identical with 
the creeds of the past. The theology that is not a growing 
theology is a dead theology. Life grows. And so, as I 
speak to some theological students here and to some who 
wi^l be such, this is my word to them : Study the (Mceds of 
the past in order that you may find out from the thinking of 



2/2 OUT OF THE PAST. 

the past how to think better yourself for the present and for 
the future. 

But these are illustrations ; and I have come here, with 
these brief illustrations, to lay emphasis on the practical 
and personal side of my theme. Let us then imagine 
one and another from this congregation coming up before 
me and speaking of his experience and letting me talk 
with him before this great congregation as I might talk 
with him at Wadsworth House. One young man, then, 
comes saying, " I was brought up in an orthodox circle. 
My mother was a devout believer. I learned from her the 
Christian creed and the Christian Bible ; I learned to pray ; 
I had no doubts. I began my studies, and soon came to 
the conclusion that the world was not made in six days. 
Presently I discovered that man had been more than six 
thousand years on the earth. Then I reached the con- 
clusion that he had come from a lower order of animals. 
Then I discovered that language was not broken up at the 
Tower of Babel. I found reason to doubt one after another 
of the so-called miracles of the Bible, until at last my faith 
is all gone. I do not know what I believe, or whether I 
believe anything. I do not know what I believe about the 
Bible, about Christ, about myself. I do not even know 
whether I am immortal, or whether there is a God or not. 
O that I could go back to the simple faith of my childhood ! 
but I cannot." 

That is very true. You certainly cannot. You must 
begin your progress from your present position. You can- 
not undo, if you would, the processes of growth, whether 
they are good or evil. It is vain to sing, '' I would I were 
a boy again; '* you are not going to be a boy again; you 
are a man, and must take life as you have come to it, and 
out of your present condition evolve your future. You 
sigh for the simple faith of your mother ; it was a beautiful 



OUT OF THE PAST. 273 

faith, and it sustained her in her simple life. But it would 
not sustain you in your life, and it is no discredit to her to 
say that it would not enable her to meet the skepticism 
that you have to meet. You must have another faith than 
hers. The unshaken faith of childhood is gone forever; 
you must have shaken faith or none at all. Pardon a word 
of autobiography. I remember my own college days, when 
I became skeptical. I doubted every article of the 
Christian creed, save only two. I think I never doubted 
my own immortality, or the existence of agood God ; but 
everything else was doubtful. I am not sorry. All the 
faith 1 have to-day I won by wrestHng, and I am glad of it. 
There are doubtless those in this congregation who cannot 
understand a skeptical mind; and I would not plunge 
them into skepticism. There are others who can hardly 
understand a mind that is not skeptical ; I would not give 
them "a simple faith,*' as they call it, if I could. Take 
your position where you are. Start with the equipment 
which life has already given you. There are birds that sing 
in the sunshine while blossoms are fragrant and the skies 
are blue, and they are beautiful. And there are eagles that 
fly out from their eyries among the rocks and crags and 
breast the storm, and rejoice to breast it, while the rain 
beats pitilessly upon them, and the wind howls about them ; 
and they also are beautiful, and God has place for both 
kinds. Do not be afraid of your doubts. They are your 
friends. The highway to earnest belief is earnest doubting. 
A question-mark is simply evidence that a man is beginning 
to think. Take, then, the doubts which education has 
given you, and face them. Seek to resolve them. The 
only skepticism that the pulpit has a right to condemn is 
the skepticism of Pilate, who says, with a shrug of his 
shoulders, " What is truth? " and goes out without waiting 
for an answer. If you wish to know the truth, dare to 
18 



274 OUT OF THE PAST. 

inquire into everything. For there is no truth, however 
bitter, that is not better than any delusion, however sweet. 
If you are not immortal, it is better for you to know it than 
to think you are. If there is no God, it is better that you 
should know it than to think there is one. " Prove all 
things," says the Apostle. Start, then, out of your past, 
with the equipment of your present ; be not abashed nor 
ashamed to look at that past ; and out of it and out of the 
present seek for your future. 

But there comes another and says, " My case is worse. 
I have not merely come to doubt ; I have come to lose 
the power of believing." There is a pathetic passage in 
the life of Darwin, in which he says — I am quoting from 
memory only — ^^ I once loved music, I once loved Shake- 
speare. Now I care not for music, and reading Shake- 
speare is dull and drear to me. I am afraid I have atro- 
phied my faculties by disuse. If I could live my life over 
again, I would not concentrate my thought quite so much 
on physical science." So this man who comes before me 
says, ^^ I have atrophied my faculties." More than one 
man has written to me saying, ^' I was a prosperous busi- 
ness man ; I had my wife and children, my life was tran- 
quil, I was satisfied. Now death has suddenly taken away 
my wife. Will you tell me of some book, or send me some 
article, or write me some letter that will prove to me the 
immortality of the soul?" He might as well ask me to 
prove color to a man who has lost his eyes, or music to one 
who had lost the power of hearing. When a man comes 
to me and says, " You say you know you are immortal — tell 
me how I can know it. You say you see God and speak 
to Him, and that He speaks to you. But I have no such 
experience; tell me how to get it," I must say, "No, I 
cannot. You have lost the power. Begin where you are. 
Evolve your future, not out of my past, but out of your 



OUT OF THE PAST. 275 

past. Are you blind ? It is pitiful to be blind, but some 
great men have been blind. Did you never read of the 
blind bard Homer, or the blind singer Milton? Have 
you never seen a blind man on the street, tapping his stick 
on the sidewalk or led by a little dog, and yet with sun- 
shine on his face? If you have no vision, walk as a blind 
man. There are other blind men; teach them how to 
walk ! " 

You do not know if you are immortal ? My friend, 
there is something a great deal more important. It is this : 
living as a man lives who deserves to be immortal. It is a 
great deal better not to be immortal and to have a soul that 
is worth immortality, than to be immortal and to have a 
soul that does not deserve immortality. What could one 
think of worse than this, to have a soul that ought to die 
and could not ? Live the immortal life now and here, and 
feel your way if you cannot see. If you do not know 
whether there is a God, what does that mean? You know 
there is a Power at the heart of the universe, but you are 
not sure that it is wise and good and righteous. Perhaps 
the world, after all, is governed by chance, as the dice hap- 
pen to fall. Or perhaps there is evil at the heart of things, 
and wickedness will triumph in the end. What of it ? Live 
as though there were a good God ! What do you worship ? 
If you worship Success, I have nothing more to say to you. 
But if you worship Goodness, worship it whether it is at the 
heart of the universe or not. What would you have ? 
Suppose at the end of time the great drama shall end as the 
drama ended when Christ hung on the cross ? Suppose at 
the end of time blackness falls, and the universe quakes at 
the very heart, and God Almighty hangs dying, and the 
devil is triumphant ? Would you not rather be crucified 
with Christ than be crowned with Caiaphas triumphant ? 
Live as though there were a good God, and worship good- 



276 OUT OF THE PAST. 

ness whether it be weak or strong. Take your present, with 
your bUndness and its atrophy, and Hve as though there 
were goodness. And if there be no other good one, be 
good yourself. 

But my third friend is in worse condition than either. 
He comes to me and says, ^^ It is not mere doubt, it is not 
mere disbelief, it is not mere incapacity to see visions and 
dream dreams, that troubles me. I have thrown my life 
away. I have done the things I ought not to have done ; I 
have left undone the things I ought to have done, and there 
is no health in me. My opportunities I have squandered, 
my body I have vitiated, my mind I have degraded, my 
imagination I have filled with owls and bats. I have en- 
tangled myself with evil habits, with evil companions. Oh, 
would God I could go back again ! Would God I could get 
rid of these vile imaginings, this blood-poisoning that is in 
my veins ! Would God I could make a new start in life ! 
But I cannot." No, that is true, you cannot. I know we 
ministers sometimes talk as if you could — because we min- 
isters can teach only a little fragment of truth at a time. 
But you cannot go back. The angel with the flaming sword 
stands at the gate of Eden, and he who has gone out from 
innocence never can return to innocence again, never ! 
The song the redeemed sing in heaven is not the song of 
Eden ; it is a new '^ song." Out of the experience of your 
own folly, your own failure, and your own sin, with all that 
past behind you, you must move forward to your future. 
And you can. Paul never could have written the Epistle to 
the Galatians if he had not been a proud, haughty, persecut- 
ing Pharisee. Saint Augustine never could have written the 
Confessions if he had not been first the rou6 Augustine. 
lAither never could have pinned the theses on the door of 
the church at Wittenberg if he had not been a superstitious 
monk. John B. Gough never could have been the mission- 



OUT OF THE PAST. 277 

ary to two continents in the cause of temperance, and 
swayed men's hearts as he did sway them, if he had not 
lain drunken in the gutter and fought deHrium tremens. 
What is a man to do when he has thrown away his Hfe, when 
he has poison in his veins, when all the past influences 
and all the companions of the present enmesh him ? Three 
things. First, repent of the sin, turn away from it, aban- 
don it, say, " I will have no more to do with it." Second, 
repair the evil so far as it can be repaired. Third, take the 
experience of the past, and make it minister to the wisdom 
and the grace — aye, and I dare to say the glory — of the 
future. 

" In every to-day walks a to-morrow." If you have 
made great achievements, if you have done splendid work, 
if you stand high in other people's esteem, and especially 
in your own, do not stop to write bulletins of victory to 
yourself or others. The only reward worth the having for 
having done good work yesterday is a chance to do a better 
work to-morrow. The only reward for having reached a 
certain milestone in life's journey is the chance to do a 
better day's journey the next day. You remember Grant's 
message to Sheridan when he got the word of Sheridan's 
victory ? " Push things." On the other hand, if you have 
failed, if through your own fault and your own folly, or the 
fault and the folly of others, you have seemed to lose your 
chance, if you have lost the simple faith of your child- 
hood, if you have atrophied your faculties, even if you have 
poisoned your blood, begin where you are to-day, and out 
of the treasured experience of the past, with all its good 
and also with all its evil, set your face forward toward a 
nobler and a more splendid future. 

And never say you are too old. You do not say it now, 
perhaj)s ; but by and by, when the hair grows gray and the 
eyes grow dim and the grim despair comes to curse the old 



2/8 OUT OF THE PAST. 

age, you will say, '^ It is too late for me.'^ Never too late ! 
Never too old! How old are you — thirty, fifty, eighty? 
What is that in immortality? We are but children. 
When I hear a man saying it is too late, it seems to me as 
when two little children are playing in a nursery, and the 
one who has dropped his doll and broken it and seen the 
sawdust run out says, " Life is not worth living." You 
have eternity before you. Begin, not from an imaginary 
past, to which you can never go back ; not from an imag- 
inary future which you have not reached. Begin from the 
present, with all its treasury of good — aye, and with all its 
treasury of evil. And, keeping the pathway unbroken from 
the past to the future, lead on to life, to larger life, and yet 
larger life, answering the calling of Him whose call is ever 
upward, upward. 



UNCONSCIOUS FOLLOWING OF CHRIST. 

" He that receiveth you receiveth me, and he that receiveth me re- 
ceiveth him that sent me. He that receiveth a prophet in the nafne of 
a prophet shall receive a prop he fs reward; and he that receiveth a 
righteous man iit the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous 
man^s reward. And whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these 
little ones a cup of cold water only^ in the nam,e of a disciple^ verily 
I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward.''* 

(Matthew x. 40-42.) 

I WISH first to interpret this text and next to apply it. 

Jesus Christ had but Httle time to do the work which He 
had to do on the earth. He wished, before He left Galilee, 
to have the message of the Gospel delivered throughout 
Galilee. It was not then, as it is now, a comparatively 
deserted region ; it was wealthy and populous. It is said 
that there were five cities of considerable size along thirteen 
miles of coast on the Galilean Sea. It was impossible that 
He should personally minister to all this great population ; 
so He called the twelve disciples about Him and gave them 
their message and their mission. He took the great cities; 
He sent them into the towns and villages. It was at the 
close of the commission which He gave them that these 
words were uttered. He said to them, practically: lam 
not able to go to all these people ; but you can go in My 
name, you can carry My message, you can tell My Gospel, 
and whoever receiveth you will receive Me. 

This is still true. Christ is ])rcscnt ; and thou^li thrre 

are many to whom the intangi])le and invisi])lc prcscMu c is 

279 



28o UNCONSCIOUS FOLLOWING OF CHRIST. 

unreal, there are many to whom He comes, as it were, in 
vision. Still He sends his messengers and missioners; 
men who have received his Gospel into their hearts, men 
who have had some vision of Him, or got from others some 
vision of a vision of Him ; still He says to men. He that re- 
ceives My messenger. My disciple, My gospeler, the one who 
is doing My mission, receives Me. 

In some respects it would have been easier to receive the 
Christ than the Twelve — the Christ whose face was now 
awful and now luminous, now so full of a strange hght that 
men shrank back from Him and fell to the ground, and now 
so full of an equally strange love that little children reached 
out their hands to come to Him and to be embraced by 
Him. To listen to this man, who spake as no other man 
spake, no wonder that crowds thronged j but it was not so 
easy to give attention to the crude, raw Peter or the hesi- 
tating, doubtful Thomas, or even the fiery and loud John. 
" To receive you," He says, " is to receive Me ; " and then 
He added, " To receive Me is to receive Him that sent Me." 
I have come. He tells us elsewhere, not of Myself ; I speak 
not My own words ; I am the bearer of a divine message 
and a divine life. 

The world could not understand God, and cannot now. 
He is too large, too pure Spirit (if you will), too transcend- 
ing all our apprehension. How can the finite compre- 
hend the infinite ? Only can we understand so much of 
Him as we ourselves are : His knowledge, by seeing a little 
way and understanding that there is an infinite knowledge 
running far beyond ; His love, by seeing a little way and 
knowing that there is an infinite love far beyond. So the 
Infinite and the Eternal comes into life, or sends into life 
(I care not how you put it), one who bears the divine life 
in a human experience, and manifests on the earth what 
Dr. van Dyke has called the human hfe of God ; and what 



UNCONSCIOUS FOLLOWING OF CHRIST. 28 1 

Christ says is this : He who sees not God, but sees this 
human life of God ; he who does not see the Infinite, but 
sees this finite manifestation of the Infinite ; he who can- 
not understand a Universal Love, but can comprehend love 
when it manifests itself on a little sphere and in a narrow 
life j he to whom the sorrows of life and the troubles of life 
are too great a problem, and who halts at it and yet can 
understand the splendid self-sacrifice manifested in this one 
single episode in human history — he, receiving this human 
life, receiving this self-sacrifice, receiving this gentleness, 
this heroism, this courage, and bowing before it, receives 
God, bows before God, reverences God. If you cannot 
receive the Infinite, receive the finite manifestation of the 
Infinite. Throw open your shutters, and you take in the 
sun because you take in the rays that come from the sun. 
Open your petals. Flower, and what comes to you ? The 
rain-drops. You receive the cloud because you receive the 
messengers from the cloud. To receive the missioner of 
Christ is to receive Christ ; to receive Christ is to receive 
the God who manifests Himself in human guise. 

These missioners of Christ are of two kinds : men of 
thought and men of action. The men of thought are the 
prophets. They see the divine. They see the divine in 
the human ; they interpret it by passionate utterance, by 
trope and figure; they try to show to otliers what they 
themselves have seen. Not all men are prophets ; not all 
go up the mountain top and talk with God face to face. 
Only three of the disciples stand in the top of tlie Mount 
and see him transfigured before them in glory ; then they 
come down and tell the others. But he that recxMves a 
prophet in the name of a prophet lias the reward of a 
prophet. llicre is only one Shakespeare, but the j^leas- 
ure which a reader gets in reading Shakespeare is the same 
in kind as the pleasure which Shakespeare experienced in 



282 UNCONSCIOUS FOLLOWING OF CHRIST. 

writing the play. There is only one Beethoven, but the 
pleasure which the interpreter of Beethoven has in inter- 
preting him and which the great audience has in receiving 
that interpretation is the same in kind as the pleasure of 
Beethoven in composing and creating. He that receives a 
musician in the name of a musician has a musician's reward. 
He that receives a poet in the name of a poet has a poet's 
reward. He that receives a prophet in the name of a 
prophet has a prophet's reward. 

Other followers and interpreters of Christ are the men of 
action. They have not seen visions, and they cannot put 
what they have seen into words, but they are stirred to 
deeds, and they fulfil their life by doing, not by seeing. 
Sometimes they have seen also ; sometimes they interpret 
also. A prophet may be a man of action, and the man of 
action may be a prophet, but it is not necessary to be both, 
and few men are ; and he that receives a righteous man in 
the name of a righteous man receives a righteous man's re- 
ward. He who sees the hero and follows after him, and 
tries to do within his own limited sphere the heroic action 
which a greater hero does, has a hero's reward. There is 
one great monument to General Grant, but every town and 
village in the country has a Soldiers' Monument to the 
privates who followed General Grant and fought the battles 
cheered by his example and inspired by their officers. 
This is the outward reward, the meed of praise. We all 
recognize it and we all give it, and so does God. But the 
higher reward was also theirs : the reward of doing brave 
deeds, the reward of heroic action, the reward of splendid 
service. This belongs to generals and major-generals, 
brigadier-generals and colonels ; but it belongs also to the 
private and to the drummer-boy. He who follows the hero 
and does in his own sphere and place the heroic action has 
in the service the reward of service, and has in the grateful 



UNCONSCIOUS FOLLOWING OF CHRIST. 283 

recognition of the nation the reward of praise. He may 
not be able to do much, but he can at least give a cup of 
cold water; and it makes no difference whether the deed 
be great or little, for greatness is in the spirit in which the 
deed is done and not in the thing which is accomplished. 
The stoker who stays down in the bottom of the ship keep- 
ing the fires alive, the gunner who stands upon the deck 
aiming the cannon, the admiral who walks upon the bridge 
directing the fleet, all are serving a common end, all receive 
a common reward, because all possess a common patriotism 
and a common heroism. To receive the messenger of 
Christ is to receive Christ ; to receive the human life of 
God manifested in Christ is to receive God ; to receive this 
through the ministry of a prophet is to receive the reward 
of the man of visions ; to receive it through the ministry of 
the man of action is to receive the reward of the man of 
heroism : and he will receive that reward and take that life 
and fulfil that end, though his deed be so simple a thing as 
the giving of a cup of cold water. 

I turn next to apply this principle to our life of to-day. 

There are some men to whom the divine, invisible, in- 
finite Spirit is a reahty : men whom I will call mystics ; 
men who almost seem to need no interpreter ; men who in 
times of absorption forget the outer world and see only the 
invisible and the interior; men who have known God, 
though they never have known Christ and never have known 
the Bible ; men who not only have been brooded by Him, 
but have felt the Spirit, and have been inspired l)y Him and 
have known the inspiration. There are persons in every 
church and in every Christian community to whom the 
life of devotion is an easy life. It is easy for them to un- 
derstand the revelation ; God seems to them to be always 
disclosing Himself to them. It is easy for them to pray. 
They can scarcely understand how any one cannot talk 



284 UNCONSCIOUS FOLLOWING OF CHRIST. 

with God. These men, these women, receive God directly 
and immediately and personally. If you can so receive 
him, thank God, take the revelation, utter the prayer, live 
the life which the great Father nourishes. But the great 
mass of men seem not to have such power. Whether they 
had it once and have lost it, whether they have it now and 
do not cultivate it, are metaphysical questions I do not 
enter into. To themselves they seem not to have it. They 
must have some interpreter between themselves and God. 
It is safe to say that this is probably true of the great ma- 
jority of the men, and of a very considerable number of the 
women, in this congregation ; they need an interpreter be- 
tween God and themselves. Men have sought for such an 
interpreter, and when they have not found him, they have 
imagined him ; hence idols, priests, soothsayers, and seers ; 
hence all varied intermediaries between God and man. 
This need of the human race for some human interpreter of 
God to man, God Himself has recognized, and He has put 
into the world the human life of God incarnate in one 
single human life. 

Now, if you cannot find your way to God, if to you He 
seems afar off, if when you read the definition of Herbert 
Spencer, " an Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all 
things proceed," that means nothing to you, if when you 
read the definition of Matthew Arnold, " A power not our- 
selves that makes for righteousness," that means nothing to 
you, if you want some one you can comprehend, there is 
given to you the Christ. God says. You shall have what 
you want ; here is a human life put on the earth revealing 
God, and enabling you to comprehend Him. I do not stop 
to discuss now what is the relation of this Christ to the 
Eternal Father ; I do not know — others think they do ; I 
do not care, humanly speaking ; I am quite ready to leave 
that for the future ; it is enough for me that there is one 



UNCONSCIOUS FOLLOWING OF CHRIST. 285 

who interprets the Eternal Father. If you cannot see the 
Father, see Him ; if you cannot worship the Father, worship 
Him ; if you cannot pray to the Father, pray to Him ; if you 
cannot understand the Father, try to understand Him. Paul 
came to Christ through belief in His divinity, and I think a 
great many men in the Christian Church think they cannot 
come to God through Christ unless they first believe in the 
divinity of Christ. But the twelve did not believe in the 
divinity of Christ before they came to Him ; they did not 
know anything about it ; they knew Him first as a rabbi, 
then as a prophet, then as a Messiah, and they did not 
come to any apprehension of what we call the divinity of 
Christ, certainly not to any large and adequate conception 
of it, until after His resurrection. Twelve came to God 
through the human life of Christ; one came to God 
through the divine life of Christ. 

We may come either way. If you have been taught that 
Christ is divine, if the vision of His divinity flashes upon 
you in a miraculous light, humbly accept it. If, however, 
there is no such revelation, if it seems impossible that there 
should be a divine manhood, if you cannot understand what 
was the divinity of Christ, if that is mystical and strange, 
take the man. Here He is. Splendid teaching, splendid 
work, splendid life, splendid sacrifice, growing more and 
more splendid as the years go on ; a larger and larger num- 
ber following Him, reverencing Him, worshiping Him. He 
that receives the human Christ receives God whether he 
knows it or not. 

But perhaps you cannot do that. This Christ is so far 
away — He lived eighteen centuries ago ; He lived in a difTcr- 
ent place ; a great deal of His teaching seems to you im- 
practicable. " Give to him that askcth you, and from liim 
that borroweth turn not away " — I cannot do that ; ** If one 
smite you on the one cheek, turn the other cheek also " — 1 



286 UNCONSCIOUS FOLLOWING OF CHRIST. 

cannot do that. He went on an itinerant ministry— I can- 
not do that. What then? You can receive His prophet. 
If He is so far away, if those eighteen centuries seem like a 
great gulf, if His teaching seems impracticable and hard to 
be understood, if you cannot apply it to the common affairs 
of life, if He seems to belong to another life and another 
world, learn of the men who have something of His spirit of 
sacrifice, something of His vision of God, something of 
His conception of duty, something of His ideal of life. If 
you cannot receive the Christ, receive the prophet. Take 
the Whittier, the Faber, the Phillips Brooks; take the 
preaching or the poetry or the personality ; accept the man 
as an expression of the divine. Take him wherever you 
can find him. Take him in orthodox circles, or take him 
in heterodox circles. Take Spurgeon, take Matthew Arnold, 
take Robertson, take Renan, take anybody, whoever he is, 
who makes you see something higher, nobler, better in life 
than the life you are now living — -any man, whoever he is, 
who has gotten direct from God or from the teachings of 
Jesus Christ a better conception, a higher conception, a 
more inspiring conception, than that which you possess, of 
noble living. He is the prophet of God. Receive the 
prophet as a prophet. That is what Paul means when he 
says, Quench not the spirit, despise not prophesyings. If 
you have any spiritual nature in you that responds to the in- 
audible voice and the unseen visions, do not extinguish it, and 
do not despise other men who have felt, seen, known. Why 
should you despise such witnesses? You believe that the 
world goes round the sun. Can you give the astronomical 
evidence of the fact? You take it on the testimony of wit- 
nesses. You believe that there are some islands called the 
Philippines, with which we are presently going to have some 
vital connection. Have you ever been there or ever seen 
them? You take the outward fact on the outward testi- 



UNCONSCIOUS FOLLOWING OF CHRIST. 287 

mony ; why not take the inward fact on the inward testi- 
mony? If you never have known what it is to pray, there 
are men in whose words you trust and in whose inspired 
judgment you have confidence who do know what it is to 
pray. 

But perhaps you cannot even hear the poet. You do 
not care for poetry. Browning and Tennyson and Faber 
and Watts, reUgious poetry and secular poetry, are all un- 
meaning to you. You are only a man of practical affairs ; 
only a common, a prosaic man. You like sometimes to say 
that of yourself — I am just a practical man. Well, there is 
a word for you. There are men about you who are heroic ; 
men who are honest and honorable, who are just and true, 
who are self-sacrificing and serviceable ; men who are doing 
in their lives something of what Christ did in His. There is 
not one of us who does not know somewhere some man who 
seems to have in himself something worthy of reverence. 
When I was in Terre Haute years ago there was a man at 
the head of the Union Station at Indianapolis who was so 
kindly, so considerate, so careful, so thoughtful of others, 
that every man who knew him loved him and recognized 
him as a Christian man ; and when railroad men who did 
not often go to church, even when they could, said to me, I 
do not believe in your churches, I do not believe in your 
ministers or in your Christianity, I said. Do you believe 
in Billy Jackson? — and they always did. There is not one 
of you who does not know a Billy Jackson ; and if you can- 
not follow God because He is afar off, and you cannot fol- 
low the Christ because He is mystical, take the man who 
seems to be nobler, better, and diviner than yourself and 
follow him. He that receives a righteous man — in the 
name of Christ? — no, in the name of a righteous man ; it is 
not even necessary that you should see Christ in him ; it is 
not even necessary that you should recognize the divine hi 



288 UNCONSCIOUS FOLLOWING OF CHRIST. 

the righteous man : see the nobler, better man than your- 
self, and follow him, and you will be following the one 
whom he is following. 

Felix Adler has a theology which lacks almost everything 
that seems to me essential to a good system of theology, 
and he preaches a religion which seems to me to lack a 
great deal that is essential to the highest and best religion ; 
but under Felix Adler's ministration there are scores of 
men and women in New York who are trying unselfishly to 
do good to their fellow-men. Some of them are following 
righteous ideals, and some of them are following prophets ; 
and whether they know it or not, whether they are Jews or 
Christians, whether they are believers or agnostics, they 
are following Christ; for whoever is doing good work in 
the world is doing God's work, and all God^s work is good 
work. Do I say it makes no difference ? It makes a great 
deal of difference. To go on trying to do righteous work 
just because it is righteous work, to go on doing righteous 
work with entire doubt as to whether the righteous work 
will ever come to anything or not, to go on living a 
righteous life without any faith in Christ as a leader or in 
God as a sovereign ruler, who will utilize and save my good 
work, and will destroy and utterly burn up my bad work — 
to do that seems to me very hard. I do not know that I 
should have conscience enough to try to follow a righteous 
life if I did not believe in a righteous God and a future 
life. It is a great deal easier to live the righteous life with 
faith in a righteous God and in an immortal future. But 
you can receive a righteous man in the name of a righteous 
man, and go no further, and still Christ — not I — Christ 
says to you, you shall have the righteous man's reward. 
You know what that is : the crown of righteousness laid up 
for every one that loveth His appearing. Not for every one 
who has already seen Him appear, but for every one who 



UNCONSCIOUS FOLLOWING OF CHRIST. 289 

longs for His appearing, loves it, and will welcome it when 
it comes. 

But you really cannot do anything ! If you could only go 
out and do some service ; if you could only join a College 
Settlement ; if you could only be a martyr ; if you could 
only do some great thing ! You are a mother, and your 
children keep you busy ; you are a merchant, and your store 
keeps you busy ; your health is not very good, and your 
invalidism absorbs you. ^^ He that giveth a cup of cold 
water '*— there is the word for you. It is not the thing done, 
it is the spirit of the doer ; for do you not see there is only 
one thing in the world that is worth anything — that is charac- 
ter ? Not what is done, but the men who do it ; not the fin- 
ger, but the heart that moves the finger ; not the achievement, 
but the spirit that stirs to the achievement. Therefore, he 
who has the character that wants to help on the cause of 
righteousness, the cause of goodness, the cause of purity 
and truth in the world, though the only thing he can do is 
to give a cup of cold water — he belongs in God's great 
band. 

There were men who fought by the side of General Grant 
and received his commands, day by day, from him ; and 
there were other men who fought just as loyally who never 
set their eyes on him from the beginning of the campaign 
to the end, but they followed him. He gave his command 
to his major-generals, and the major-generals to the 
brigadier-generals, and the brigadier-generals to the colonels, 
and the colonels to the captains, and the captains to the 
sergeants, and at last the private got the order and obeyed 
it; and he was obeying General Grant, although he never 
saw General Grant. If you cannot get your order direct 
from the commander-in-chief, take it from the sergeant — 
only obey it. We march through the world, this great pro- 
cession, with many banners and with many kinds of music ; 
19 



290 UNCONSCIOUS FOLLOWING OF CHRIST. 

the shouting Methodist, the orderly Episcopahan, the serene 
and stable Presbyterian, the quiet and reticent Quaker, the 
individual sharpshooter who calls himself a Congregational- 
ist j here they are, all of them — marching in one great 
procession. At the head I think I see the Christ who bears 
the Cross ; and around Him are men like Him, who hear 
directly the word of God, and see directly the Father who 
has commissioned them ; but he who far down the rank still 
trudges on, through dust and toil and sun and suffering, 
following righteousness, is following Christ. You young men 
and you young woman, aye, and you older men and women, 
who say, I cannot be a Christian because I do not under- 
stand God and I do not understand Christ, I do not under- 
stand prophecy and I do not understand mysticism, and 
religion all seems to me to be in the clouds — I am talking 
to you this morning, and I tell you that if you take the 
Church as your lawgiver you may have some excuse for 
thinking you cannot be a Christian, but if you take Christ 
you have none. If you cannot see God, look at Christ ; if 
you cannot see Christ, listen to the prophet ; if you can- 
not hear the prophet, follow the righteous man. 



1 



PAUL'S GOSPEL FOR AHERICA. 

" But 7ve speak the wisdom of God m a mystery^ even the hidden 
wisdom^ which God ordained before the world unto our glory J*^ 

(i Cor, a. 7.) 

Corinth presented probably the hardest field that Paul 
ever labored in. It was a city given over to skepticism. 
The Sophists were scholastic theologians before theology 
was born. They devoted themselves to the discussion of 
minute points of abstract philosophy. They assumed that the 
knowledge of man was obtained through his senses ; and 
they made perpetual and futile attempts to penetrate the 
mystery of life through the senses and the reason. The re- 
sult of their endeavors was, according to an ancient story, 
fairly summed up by a conversation between two of these 
Sophists, one of whom said, " I have concluded that I know 
nothing; " and the other of whom replied, ^' I have con- 
cluded that I do not even know that ! " This was the skep- 
ticism of Corinth. God, the future, the soul of man, the 
cause of natural and moral obligations, the reality of moral 
obligations — all unknown. And closely related to this, 
perhaps growing out of it, perhaps producing it, was a 
spirit of worldliness and sensuality. It was the most cor- 
rupt city of the most corrupt State in the most cornipt age 
of the world. Religion — that is, the heathen religion — had 
no relation to morality in Corinth, and the temples them- 
selves were dedicated to the promotion of dnirikonncss and 

of vice. After Paul had planted a chun^h, and como away, 

291 



292 PAUL'S GOSPEL FOR AMERICA. 

this spirit of skepticism and this spirit of worldliness en- 
tered the church; and the church itself became divided 
into factions. One faction said, ^'We stand by the old 
religion, of which Christianity is only a new form;" they 
called themselves followers of Peter. The second said, " We 
are radicals; we have cut ourselves loose from the first; 
Christianity has nothing to do with the ancient religion ; " 
they called themselves followers of Paul. The third said, 
" Christianity is a new theology ; we must have a new 
philosophy to explain it; '' they called themselves followers 
of Apollos. The fourth said, " We for ourselves have such 
an intimate relationship with Christ that we neither need 
tradition nor philosophy, old or new, to help us;" they 
called themselves followers of Christ. So there sprang up 
even then the traditionalists, the radicals, the scholastics, 
and the mystics; and the Church of Christ, facing the 
grossest form of skepticism and the grossest form of world- 
liness, faced it divided into contending factions who were 
fighting one another. 

In some sense history does repeat itself ; and though cer- 
tainly it will be untrue to say that American life mirrors 
Corinthian life, it is not untrue to say that those features 
of Corinthian life are in a modified and ameHorated form 
reproduced in American life. We confront the same spirit 
of skepticism which declares that all that a man knows he 
learns through his senses and by what he can deduce from 
his senses. We know what we can see, and hear, and 
touch, and taste, and feel ; and what we can conclude from 
what we can see, and hear, and touch, and taste, and feel : 
and all the rest is imagination. This is called sensational- 
ism in philosophy ; and this sensationalism in philosophy 
leads on to skepticism in theology ; it leads on by inevitable 
and logical deduction to the conclusion that there is no 
certainty of God in the universe ; and, for that matter, no 



PAUL S GOSPEL FOR AMERICA. 293 

certainty of the soul in man. " I have searched the uni- 
verse," says Lalande, " with my telescope ; and I cannot 
find God 1 " And this also leads on to what is called 
utilitarianism in ethics. There is no instinctive and 
intuitive perception of virtue. There is no recognition 
of honesty and honor and truth for their own sake; 
but that is virtuous which produces the greatest amount 
of happiness for the greatest number of people. Hap- 
piness, the end of creation; the eye, the means of the 
acquisition of knowledge ; and we not knowing who rules 
us and whose light is before us ! And closely connected 
with this, growing out of it and reacting on and helping to 
produce it, is the spirit of luxury, eifeminacy, vice. The 
simplicity of the colonial days is gone, and we cannot bring 
it back again. That simplicity of the colonial days was 
partly a product of the poverty of the colonial days ; and 
it is doubtful whether any of us are saintly enough to desire 
both the poverty and simplicity. Both have gone. We 
have great aggregations of capital; we have men selling 
themselves to make money, and measuring themselves by 
the amount of money they make; we have young men 
coming to the cities and worshiping success ; and we have 
men following the counsel, *^ Get on, honestly if you can ; 
dishonestly if you must." Day before yesterday I heard 
three young men talking in a trolley-car — that was in New 
York, but, after all. New York is not unlike other cities in 
America — and one young man said to the other, *' What 
business are you in? " The other answered, '' I am in six 
businesses." And the other man said to him, *^ You must 
be making some money." The reply was, *^ Well, I am not 
complaining." It is a very simple little dialogue ; but it 
was perfectly clear that those three men, then and there, on 
that Friday morning— it was not Sunday, in a church, then 
their words might have becMi dilTerent — but on that iMiilay 



294 PAUL'S GOSPEL FOR AMERICA. 

morning, they considered the question for them was, '* How 
shall we make money? " And thus in our American hie 
we are continually asking, " What is a man worth ? How 
many thousands?" — measuring the man with a dollar- 
mark, as you would measure pork. And, growing out of it, 
this conception of value is the conception of happiness as 
the end of life. Pleasure ! Pleasure ! Pleasure ! That is the 
end of life, according to this form of utilitarianism. So we 
find the same forces undermining the moral life of America 
that were undermining the moral hfe of Corinth. 

And this spirit of skepticism, this spirit of worldliness, 
undermining the Church and creeping into it, brings with it 
sectarianism. You can take Paul's description of the parties 
in Corinth, and read it again, putting other men's names in it 
in the place of Paul, Apollos, Cephas, and Christ ; and you 
will have a picture of the sectarian spirit of our own time : 
I am of Calvin ; I am of Wesley ; I am of Fox ; and I am 
of Christ : for we have the Christians here also. It is said 
that there are in America over three hundred separate 
Protestant denominations ; and, as if that were not enough, 
there are quite a goodly number of independent churches 
besides ; while there are men who do not know about join- 
ing the Church, for they do not know which church to join ! 
We are divided on questions of doctrine into Calvinists and 
Armenians; we are divided on questions of order into 
Presbyterians and Congregationalists and Episcopalians; 
we are divided on questions of ritual into Baptists and 
Pedo-Baptists ; and, as if that were not enough, there are 
at least two or three Presbyterian divisions ; there are two 
or three Methodist divisions ; there are two Episcopahan 
divisions ; and I do not know how many of Congregation- 
alists. Thus you have here in America the same spirit of 
skepticism, the same spirit of worldliness, and the same 
spirit of sectarianism, which Paul confronted in Corinth. 



PAULAS GOSPEL FOR AMERICA. 295 

Now, as far as I can within the limits of a single sermon, 
which ought to be briefer than I am afraid I am going to 
make this, this morning, I want to point out what was Paul's 
method of meeting skepticism, worldliness, and sectarianism, 
as he indicates it in his first letter to the Corinthians. 
He treats these all as symptoms of the same disease, and 
appHes to them all the same remedy. With that character- 
istic radicalism which belonged to him, he says, in effect, 
"You skeptics, I concede all that you claim; and you are 
wrong. You men of the world, I concede all that you 
claim ; and you are wrong. You sectarians, I concede noth- 
ing to you; and you are wrong ! " The skeptic says, "I 
can see ; I can hear ; I can touch ; I can taste ; I can feel ; 
and seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, feeling, that is believ- 
ing. I know those things ; and from all those things by my 
reason I can reach certain conclusions. I know those things ; 
but all that lies beyond is the unknown." And Paul says, 
'*' Yes, you are right ; but it is written. Eye hath not seen, nor 
ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the 
things which God hath prepared for them that love Him." 
Lalande says, " I have searched the heavens for God ; and 
I cannot find Him." Paul says, " You are right. You 
cannot find Him. Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard Him. 
The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of 
God : for they are foolishness unto him ; neither can he 
know them." You are wise to be an agnostic; for all you 
know is derived from your eye and ear. You cannot know 
God ; you cannot know immortality ; you cannot know 
Christ; you cannot know eternal things by the sense and 
by deductions from the senses. lUit we speak the wisdom 
of God in a mystery; which things also we sj^eak, not in the 
words which man's wisdom teacheth, but wluc^h the Holy 
Ghost teacheth." They arc spiritually discerned. Paul 
starts with the affirmation that man is more than an animal. 



296 PAUL'S GOSPEL FOR AMERICA. 

and more than a sensible being ; he has in him more than 
that which the eye can see and the ear can hear ; he has 
a sixth sense; he has in him a direct and immediate 
capacity for perceiving the invisible and the eternal. If a 
man shuts his eyes, he cannot see color ; if he shuts his 
ears, he cannot hear music. If he shuts this sixth sense, if 
he shuts out the spiritual nature, if he bars the doors against 
it, and will not use it, he is right to be an agnostic ; he 
ought to be. If he is seeking truth with the mere eye, the 
mere ear, and the mere reason deducing from the eye and 
ear, he cannot see God. But the greatest truths are not 
those we see through the eye, hear through the ear, or 
touch with the hand, or taste with the palate. You see 
these flowers — they are beautiful ; but why is it that one 
person sees beauty in a flower, and another person none? 

When Jenny Lind was in this country so many years ago, 
I heard her in the oratorio of "The Messiah.'^ As I sat 
in my seat, there came and sat near me an old, weather- 
beaten sea-captain, who asked me to point her out to him 
as she came in. There was a chorus, one or two solos, I 
believe, and then Jenny Lind rose and sang " Come unto 
Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden ; " and as she 
sang, it seemed to me that I could hear the voice of the 
Master singing down through the years ; and the hall was 
hushed and silent when she took her seat, with a silence 
more significant than any applause. Then I heard a harsh, 
grating sound at my side, and, turning about, saw that the 
poor old sea-captain was sound asleep, and snoring ! He 
had heard all that I heard ; he had seen all that I saw ; but 
why did he not hear what I heard ? why did he not catch 
what the audience caught? Because there was no music in 
his soul. There must be music in the soul to respond to 
the music of the organ, of the choir, of the singer ; or there 
is no music. Eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, and it 



PAUL'S GOSPEL FOR AMERICA. 297 

hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive, the 
music that God hath prepared for man. All our business 
rests on truths that are not proved, not demonstrated. We 
in our business trust one another ; and we go on trusting 
one another, in spite of the defalcations and frauds here and 
there, now and then ; we do it wisely, because we beheve 
in what? Honesty. How long is honesty? How broad is 
honesty? What color is honesty? How does honesty taste? 
What do your senses show you about honesty ? If a man 
says, " I do not believe in honesty,'^ you do not argue with 
him ; but you keep your hand on your pocketbook till you 
get out of his presence. Honesty Hes in the very structure 
of man. He sees it, he knows it. Our homes are built on 
love. Oh, mother, why do you spend so much time over 
that crippled boy? The doctor tells you he cannot live a 
great while. Two or three years, and then he will be gone 
from you. You will get no money from him — and we are 
living for money in this world ; you will get no pictures ; 
you will get no books ; nothing that your eye can see for 
it ; and you will not even get a grown-up boy by and by to 
take care of you when you get old. He has a hopeless spinal 
complaint ; he is going to die. But if you dare to say that 
to the mother, she would shoot you through with her fiery 
eyes, then look upon you with ineffable pity, as a man who 
does not know the love that transcends all things that eye 
sees, or ear hears, or reason concludes. This is Paul's 
method of meeting skepticism. He says to every man, 
" You are a spiritual being ; you are one of God's children ; 
you are of kin to the Almighty ; you have eyes to see tlie 
things that cannot be seen ; you have ears to hear the things 
that cannot be heard." How do I know that there is a 
God? How do you know that you have a mother? You 
have seen her ! Oh, I beg your pardon ; you never yet saw 
your mother. You have seen her face, her features, her eyes, 



298 PAULAS GOSPEL FOR AMERICA. 

her form ; but that is not mother. If that be mother, then 
why, when the form Hes prostrate and you press your Hps on 
the Hps that never before refused to answer that pressure, and 
look into the eyes that never before failed to look with an- 
swering love back into yours, why do you wring your hands 
and cry for "Mother!" if the form you see is mother? 
No, it is the loving heart, the spirit of ineffable and long- 
suffering tenderness, that is your mother. We who are 
Christians, having that same measure of Paul's faith, be it 
little or much, w^e know that there is a God, because we 
have seen Him, we have walked with Him, we have been upon 
the mountain and talked wdth Him ; we have been in sorrow 
and He has comforted us j we have been in weakness and 
He has strengthened us ; we have been tempted and He has 
enabled us to conquer ; we have fallen into sin and He has 
lifted from us its heavy burden. 

Are you immortal? you wonder. Well, so do I. I do 
not know. I know that part of you is mortal. And I 
see sometimes some men of w^hom I wonder whether there 
is anything about them that is not mortal. A Frenchman 
was discussing that question wdth a Christian. He argued 
at great length to prove that the soul is not immortal ; and 
the Christian friend rephed, " Probably you are right ; 
probably you are not immortal; but I am." This spring 
one of the trees said to itself, " Spring has come. The 
buds are come. The fruit is coming. I feel a stirring 
within myself. Spring is coming, bringing life, new life." 
And another tree which stood near, with dead branches 
and dead trunk and dead roots, dead from top to bottom, 
replied : " Nonsense 1 I do not feel any such stirrings 
within me. I do not feel any such flowing of sap ; I do 
not feel any such intimation ; I feel no such suggestion of 
buds. Nonsense ! It is visionary ; there is no spring 
coming." And to the dead tree there is no spring coming 



PAUL'S GOSPEL FOR AMERICA. 



"99 



as it comes to the living tree, bringing renewed life. The 
remedy for skepticism is not by labored argument to deduce 
God from the phenomena of the universe. The remedy 
for skepticism is to awake the spiritual nature of man so 
that he may see the good that was before only hypothesis ; 
that he may find certainty where before was only hope. 

And this is the remedy for worldliness also. The worldly 
man says, " The world is mine." " Yes," Paul says, " it is 
all yours. All things are yours ; whether Paul, or Apollos, 
or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, 
or things to come, all are yours." And, as he has con- 
ceded everything that the agnostic claims, yet says the 
agnostic is wrong, so he concedes all that the man of the 
world claims, and yet says that the man of the world is 
wrong. All is yours, for ye are Christ's, and Christ's is 
God's. 

Why is the world yours? It is the universal law that the 
lower is made to serve the higher; the inorganic world 
furnishes material out of which the organic is formed. Out 
of the juices and minerals of the earth the tree is framed 
and shaped; and out of the vegetable creation the animate 
is formed. The ox eats grass, and the grass becomes ox ; 
the ox does not become grass. The grass sen-es the animal, 
as the inorganic served the organic. The animal serves 
man, is made to serve him, made to be underneath him and 
in subjection to him. So in man the lower sen'cs tlie 
higher; and when any man makes the higher scn'c the 
lower, he turns creation, so far as he is concerned, iij)side 
down. In him the ox becomes grass, not grass ox. Now, 
that happens whenever a man says to himself, '' I am in 
this world to make what I can out o{ it." W hat does that 
mean? It means, 1, a spiritual being for whom things 
were created, I am going to take my reason, my vision, my 
capacity, my power, to make money. Men are not to make 



300 PAUL'S GOSPEL FOR AMERICA. 

money ; money is to make men. Folks are not for things ; 
things are for folks. Material things are for the service of 
man in his intellectual and in his spiritual state. It is no 
remedy for a man who is living for pleasure, living for 
accumulation, living for the things of this life, to say to 
him, " You must not do it quite so much ; you must put 
two dimes in the collection-plate instead of one ; or. You 
must drink one glass of beer instead of two ; you must not 
do this, you must not do that, you must not do the other.'' 
It does not make any difference what he does, so long as 
he is living upside down. We try to save ourselves from 
the worse evils of self-indulgence by drawing lines. We 
imagine that we can go on living for self — that is, using our 
higher nature to minister to our lower one, and yet be 
moral if we do not transcend certain lines. So the question 
comes up over and over again. I do not know how many 
times it has been written to me, as editor of The Outlook, 
"Where shall I draw the line?" It is drawn between 
courses of conduct ; it is wrong to go to the theater, but 
right to go to the circus — especially if you have the chil- 
dren with you. Or, lines are drawn between individuals : 
it is right for a layman to go to the theater, but he does 
not want his minister to go ; it is right for a girl to dance, 
until she joins the Church ; then she must stop dancing. 
All these fictitious, false distinctions Paul sweeps away. 
The whole world is yours ; all teachers are yours ; all books 
are yours ; all literature is yours ; all the world and all its 
activities are yours ; all things present and future are yours ; 
but they are yours to use ; to use that by them you may 
minister to your own higher nature and the higher nature 
of men and women round about you. 

A boy goes into his father's artist studio, takes some 
paints, and begins to splash carelessly on the canvas. If 
the father is foolish, he takes the pigments from the boy, 



PAUL'S GOSPEL FOR AMERICA. 30I 

boxes his ears, and says, " Go away ! " If he has wisdom 
as a father, he will say, '' My son, I am glad to see you 
trying to paint. I will show you how." And he takes 
fresh pigment, and gets a little piece of canvas, and draws 
the outline of a man, and shows the boy how to outline the 
face and fill it in with white color, and paint the jacket 
blue, and the pantaloons red ; and suddenly the boy has 
blossomed into the beginning of an artist. So all things in 
the studio of life are yours ; but you are to use them, not to 
splash the canvas, but to paint. So in that wonderfully 
poetic description of creation, in the first chapter of Gen- 
esis, what is the teaching? I have made this world for you 
to live in : take it ; use it ; have dominion over it. In 
that wonderful biography of Christ, what is the teaching? 
John the Baptist came and said, ^' This is a bad world ; it 
is an immoral world ; it is a wicked world ; I will keep 
out of the world. People grow effeminate by the dress 
they wear; I will wear a rough garment. People grow 
gluttonous by the food they eat j I will eat nothing but 
locusts and wild honey." Christ comes and begins His 
ministry by changing water into wine for the guests at the 
wedding; and ends His life drinking wine at the Last 
Supper ; and so lived during all the period of His earthly 
ministry, that from that beginning to that end, while He 
never in any instance declined a single social invitation, He 
yet gave cause for ofTense in none. He lived with all 
men, joining in their social pleasures, joining in their life, 
and bringing them to Him by it all, and yet so doing it al- 
ways that no man could call Him a winebibbcr or a glutton 
without the falsity of the accusation being at once manifest ; 
so living that every man that sees Him, and every man that 
has read the story since, knows that while He was subjected 
to all the influences with which men struggle in this life, He 
always served the Master's will — a service which meant to 



302 PAUL'S GOSPEL FOR AMERICA. 

Him self-sacrifice. The remedy for worldliness is not draw- 
ing of lines ; it is not prohibition of any kind. It is dedi- 
cation. It is a shame for a man to be a millioniare in pos- 
sessions if he is not also a millionaire in beneficence. The 
only man whom Christ called a fool was the man who 
thought that property was only good to be hoarded ; did 
not know that it was to be used ! 

Paul declares further that the cause of sectarianism in 
the Church is that same thing which has caused worldliness 
and skepticism. '' I, brethren, could not speak unto you 
as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal" — ^^ for ye are yet 
carnal j for whereas there is among you envying, and strife, 
and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men? " You 
are fleshly men, he says. And it is because you are fleshly 
men that you are divided up as you are. One says, I am 
of Paul ; and another, I am of Apollos ; and I, of Cephas ; 
and I, of Christ. It ought to add something to our humil- 
ity, this declaration of the Apostle, if we really believe it, 
that the division of the Christian Church to-day into Cal- 
vinists and Arminians, into Presbyterians and Episcopa- 
lians and Congregationalists, into Baptists and Pedo-Bap- 
tists, has for its root the same evil poison that produces 
sensuality and worldliness, that produces skepticism and 
unbelief. But that is Paul's declaration ; and his remedy 
is this : Go back to your message ; and in the fifteenth 
chapter of First Corinthians he tells us that message very 
clearly. 

Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which 
I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and 
wherein ye stand. . . . For I delivered unto you first of 
all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our 
sins according to the scriptures ; and that He was buried, 
and that He rose again the third day according to the 
scrip tuies. 



PAUL'S GOSPEL FOR AMERICA. 303 

There is a spiritual world which the eye hath not seen, 
and the ear hath not heard, and it hath not entered into the 
heart of man to conceive ; and out of that spiritual world, 
out of that invisible world all round about us, there came one 
bearing the shape and form of the Son of man, bearing in 
Himself the Spirit of the Son of God ; and He has come and 
He has lived among men that men might see, and might 
feel the divine manifestation. Our eyes have seen Him, 
says John; and our hands have handled Him. He has 
lived this life that we might understand what spiritual life 
means. We have had the swift moving vision of it; then 
it has gone out. Men have thought that the spiritual has 
died altogether ; then the Christ has come back again ; 
and with apparition after apparition, disclosure after dis- 
closure. He has hammered His way into the hearts of the 
skeptical, unbeheving disciples till they have come to the 
conclusion that they were nearer to the spirit world than 
ever they were before. He appears before their eyes ; 
He meets them at the supper-table ; He enters into their 
praying-meeting ; He joins with them where they are fish- 
ing ; He tells them, " Lo ! I am with you alway, even unto 
the end of the world." Always walking with us unseen, as 
with the disciples on the road to Emmaus. Ever since 
that day of resurrection, what is it that has been or should 
have been the message of the Church? Not a creed, 
not a symbol or system, not any such thing as that; but 
this : we know that the spirit world is real ; we know that 
He that was born of a virgin has come and lived among men ; 
we have seen Him ; we know the spirit world is real ; 
because death cannot conquer Him; He has risen from 
the dead, and come again and showed Himself to us. It 
is only when the Church docs not know, only when the 
('hurch forgets its message, only when it thinks its mes- 
sage is philosophy, or a symbol, tbnt if (juarrcls over these 



304 PAUL S GOSPEL FOR AMERICA. 

little things. Did you ever know a revival of religion and 
an ecclesiastical trial to go on in a church at the same 
time? Spiritual life — when the Church gets that; when 
it sees its Christ ; when it knows Him ; when it walks 
with Him ; when it lives with Him ; even though it still 
maintains its creed, its forms and ceremonies, and its 
order and organization, still it will not be known by these, 
nor care for these ; but only by and for that one tran- 
scendent message, that the Son of God has lived, and suf- 
fered, and died, and risen again, that we might live the 
life that He lived, and enter into eternal life with Him. 

Sometimes we wish, all of us, I think, that our poor halting 
faith might have some support from sense. If this morn- 
ing, as I talk to you, our faith could only have an instant, 
visible representation; if w^e could see Christ here; if, 
looking up, we could see the friends who have gone before 
all gathered here ; if I could see my father, and my mother, 
and my brothers, and my friends watching me to see what 
sort of a message I would give ; if you who have come 
here, some of you, with the habiliments of mourning, with 
woe in your heart, might see the friend at your side, won- 
dering that you are not wearing white in thankfulness at 
his glorification ; if only for this little while these earthly 
things could be swept away, if from this dream that we are 
living we could awake to the divine and splendid reality, we 
should not go back to quarrel with our brothers of like 
family because they phrase their behef differently, and we 
should never go back to doubt again the splendid, divine 
reality of the spiritual life. Why do we wait for our 
heaven? Why? "Ye are come unto Mount Sion, unto 
the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to 
an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly 
and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, 
and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men 



PAUL'S GOSPEL FOR AxMERICA. 305 

made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new 
covenant." " Ye are come : " not by and by in some great 
judgment day shall we come, not by and by when God 
mercifully strips off from us this covering of our flesh, and 
our spirit is emancipatated ; now ! now ! ye have come. 
The remedy for skepticism, and the remedy for sensuality 
and effeminacy and luxury, and the remedy for sectarian 
divisions and strife in the Church of Jesus Christ, is all one. 
It is the spiritual vision that knows and sees God, Christ, 
and immortality, and lives with Him in the eternal life, 
here and now ! 
20 



A CONFESSION OF FAITH.* 

Wham therefore without knoiving him, ye worship, him declare 1 
unto you. {Acts xzii. 23.) 

This is the Gospel in epitome ; this the message of the 
Christian minister ; to declare to men who do reverence 
God without knowing Him, the God whom they reverence. 

Twelve years ago next month (I might almost say next 
week) the former pastor of this church died. In the fall 
following I came, first to be preacher and then to be pastor. 
For eleven and a half years I have been your minister. 
To-day I am your minister for the last religious ser\'ice; 
and it seemed to me appropriate to take this occasion to 
sum up in a single discourse the message which I have tried 
to give to you, and which I hope to continue to give as 
long as I live. For I wish to turn your thoughts away from 
me and from yourselves and from the occasion to the mes- 
sage of the Gospel and to Him who is the center of that 
message. 

* The Rev. Lyman Abbott, after eleven years of service, resigned 
the pastorate of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, on Sunday, November 
27, 1S9S; for letter of resignation see The Outlook for December 3, 
1S98. The resignation was made to take effect at such time as might 
meet the convenience of the church. Dr. X. D. Hillis was called to 
the pastorate Januar}' 17, 1S99, accepted the call, and was expected to 
enter upon its duties some time in March. Dr. Abbott, upon con- 
ference with the Committee of the Church, arranged to bring his 
pastorate to a close on February 26, and this sermon was preached 
on this occasion and was followed by the communion service. 

306 



A CONFESSION OF FAITH. 307 

I have assumed, through these years, that you and I be- 
long to one family ; not because we are of one church, or 
of one creed, or of one country, or even of one race, but 
because we are of one Father. I have assumed that you 
and I are children of God j not that we can by some re- 
ligious service become children of God, but that we are the 
children of God. Perhaps it would be more accurate to 
say that we are becoming children of God, that we are 
emerging from the animal into the divine and spiritual con- 
dition, and that, though relics of the past still cling about 
us and make us of the earth earthy, there is in every one 
of us a true kinship with the ever-living Father. Some of 
us know Him and are living at home with Him and are 
happy in our lives ; some of us sometimes live at home with 
Him and sometimes do not, sometimes are happy in our 
lives and sometimes are not ; some of us are conscious that 
we have strayed away from Him, but we have turned our 
face toward Him again and are traveling homeward, doubt- 
ing whether He will receive us or not, and harassing our 
hearts with our doubts and questionings ] and some of us 
do not know Him at all, and have no knowledge of Him, 
and act as though we were orphans. But whether we know 
Him or not, whether we love Him or not, whether we are 
conscious of Him or not, we a^-e His children — every one 
of us ; and within every one of us there is some sort of 
witness to our kinship with Him ; and in my speaking to 
you I have appealed to this witness within yourselves of 
your kinship with God. Paul does indeed say, in that pas- 
sage which we have read this morning, that once we were 
dead in trespasses and sins. But I have not tried to speak 
to those who are dead, for it is not in the power ofaproi)h- 
et's voice to call dead men to life again. I have thought 
of those of you who least responded to spiritual truth, not 
as dead, but as asleep, with the divine life in you donnant, 



308 A CONFESSION OF FAITH. 

and I have tried to waken it. And, for this purpose, I have 
tried first of all to know myself the God whom I wanted to 
make others know, that He might be in me and speak 
through me. 

The whole world seems to me to be seeking after God, 
and God seeking after the whole world. God seeking after 
men? Cannot He do everything? No! A mother can- 
not reveal astronomy to a babe four years old. God can 
reveal Himself to us only so far as there is in us capacity to 
receive the revelation j and it seems to me that God is try- 
ing all methods, all plans, that He may reach the hearts of 
men and awaken them, and cause them to see that God is 
in His world, and that God is their friend. The question 
is sometimes asked. Are we to say that man is seeking God, 
or God is seeking man? Will you say that the sprouting 
seed is seeking the sun, or the sun is seeking the seed? 
They are coming toward each other. Will you say that the 
child loves the mother, or the mother loves the child? 
The love of the mother has wrought love in the child. 
Man is seeking God, because God is seeking man. All re- 
ligion seems to me to be just this : God seeking men, men 
seeking God ; God using the means that men understand, 
speaking their vernacular, coming to them through such 
avenues as they open to Him, appealing to them through 
their reason, their affections, their tastes, their sensuous 
nature, in whatever way He can, coming to them through 
their priests, through their prophets, through men like- 
minded with themselves, coming to them often through 
methods that seem to us slow and unspiritual and inade- 
quate. All religions are groping after Him, trying to find 
Him — and not all religions only, but all life. The young 
man says, I will make a fortune ; success is what I will 
pursue. He is pursuing God and does not know it, for he 
never will find success until he finds it in God. The mer- 



A CONFESSION OF FAITH. 309 

chant may think that he is in life to accumulate ; he is not ; 
he is here to distribute, and to distribute in the very process 
of accumulation. The manufacturer is finding his way to 
God j for he also is creating, and by his process of creating 
is learning something of the Creator. The artist is search- 
ing for beauty; and beauty is God, and God is beauty. 
The philosopher is looking for truth, and truth is God and 
God is truth. The youth says, I am satisfied, I have found 
love ; the mother says. At last I am satisfied, I have found 
love. And yet the wife and the babe are themselves but 
teaching us what is the meaning of love : and love is God 
and God is love. 

And so these Sunday mornings I have talked to you, as 
one brother talks to other brethren, knowing God a little, 
and believing that you want to know God, and trying to 
tell you a httle about Him, and trying to waken a little of 
the experience of God in your own hearts. This is always 
the message, it seems to me, of the prophet. And if He 
comes to the man whose life is in accumulation or in ambi- 
tion, this is still His message : Why do you spend your 
money for that which satisfieth not? Why do you not see 
that all experiences lead you on and up to God ? — that God 
is Creator, and manufacturing teaches you of Him ; that 
God is Benefactor, and distribution teaches you of Him ; 
that God is Teacher, and philosophy teaches you of Him ; 
that God is Father, and the home teaches you of Him ; that 
God is Lover, and love teaches you of Him ; that God is the 
Comforter, and sorrow teaches you of Him; that God is 
Redeemer, and sin and repentance teach you of Him; 
that all life-experiences are but ministers that load you 
toward Him. 

If this were all, I might be a minister, but I should not bo 
a Christian minister. But I believe that God has found 
man, and man has found God, and that in the one inroni- 



3IO A CONFESSION OF FAITH. 

parable historical revelation God and man have come to- 
gether, and God has filled the one human life full of HimseK, 
and in the Christ I see the God, and in the Christ I see the 
man. I have not been able, and I do not wish to be able, 
to furnish a philosophical definition of Christ. We are 
living in an analytical age, when everything is put on the 
dissecting-table and examined. Even our children we are 
making subjects of study, using them as specimens of 
natural history, investigating the way in which they begin to 
think, to live, to love. There are some experiences that 
seem to me too sacred for the laboratory. I do not wish 
to analyze the love of my mother or my wife or my child. 
I would rather have it than analyze it. And so I leave to 
others to determine what is the relation of Christ to the 
Everlasting Father, and what He is in Himself, what is the 
metaphysical analysis of His character. I do not know, and, 
reverently I say it, I do not much care to know. To me 
Christ is less an object of knowledge than of simple rever- 
ence and love. If I take the words of the old creeds or 
the older Bible as philosophical definitions to be scientific- 
ally interpreted, some of them I should have to doubt ; but 
if I take them as the expressions of an exuberant, loyal love, 
I rejoice in them. To me He is Light of Light and God of 
God, very Light of very Light and very God of very God ; 
to me He is the Wonderful, the Counselor, the Everlasting 
Father, the Prince of Peace ; before Him I bow, crying out 
as I look up to His thorn-crowned brow and spear-pierced 
side. My Lord and my God ! I know no reverence that 
goes beyond the reverence I give to Him ; no love I ever 
knew goes beyond the love I want to offer Him ; there is no 
loyalty I have toward any being, seen or unseen, known or 
imagined, that transcends the loyalty I wish to pay Him. 
He is my Lord, He is my Master. I am sorry I do not 
understand Him better ; I am sorry I do not love Him more ; 



A CONFESSION OF FAITH. 311 

I am sorry my capacity for reverence is so slight ; I am 
sorry I follow Him so far of? ; for He is my all and in all ; I 
have no thought of God that runs beyond Him ; no rever- 
ence or affection that ever transcends or can transcend 
what I want to lay at His feet. 

And yet He says to me Follow me; and his Apostle 
says to me, Be ye like Him ; and I believe that I can fol- 
low Him, and I dare to believe that I shall be like Him. 
For I believe that I am one of God's children and you are 
another, and He also is God's Son, the first-born among 
many brethren. This is my starting-point. If I began as 
the old theology began, with the total depravity of the hu- 
man race, I should find a great perplexity to know how to 
reconcile my faith in Christ as man with my faith in Christ 
as God. But I start elsewhere ; I start with this : that the 
whole human race are God's children, and Jesus Christ is 
the typical Son of man because He is the typical Son of 
God. What is human nature ? Jesus Christ is human 
nature. If I want to know what the drama is, I will not go 
to a Bowery theater ; I will read Shakespeare ; if I want 
to know what is philosophy, I will not take the latest creed 
of Christian Science, I will read Plato ; if I want to know 
what humanity is, I will not go to the bar-room to find it, I 
will go to Calvary. Jesus Christ is human nature as it is 
to be, as it is in its ideal, in its perfection. And when he 
says, Follow me, I believe I can. A father starts with his 
children for a climb, and they stop to gather flowers by the 
way, and he goes on ; and by and by they find themselves 
alone and look up ; and far above them on a cliff stands 
father, and he calls down to them, Boys, come on ! How 
shall they come on? How shall they climb that steep 
precipice? They do not stop to ask. I Ic is there ; he says, 
Come on ; they know they can find a i)ath, and they can 
come on. He would not call them if they could not 



312 A CONFESSION OF FAITH. 

come. And so, when the Christ stands far, far above me 
in the glad sunhght and calls down to me. Follow me, I 
know somewhere there is a path up the mountain-side 
that will lead me up, and if I follow by and by I shall stand 
by his side in the same glad sunlight. I can, or he would 
not call me. So I turn to my brothers and sisters who 
have stopped to pick flowers with me, and say to them, 
There is our Elder Brother. He is with Father. He calls 
us to follow him. We can, or He would not call us. He 
knows. Let us follow. 

That has been my message ; and yet not all of it. If I 
could only think the whole world really, earnestly, intelli- 
gently wanted God and sought Him, what an easy message 
the Christian minister's message would be, and what a 
delightful thing it would be to give it ! It is delightful to 
give it to those who are seeking God, and to such I have 
been giving it for these eleven years. I am sorry I am not 
going to preach any more in Plymouth Church, and yet 1 
am glad. I have preached here in Plymouth Church to 
men and women who themselves know what I know about 
God, who believe what I believe about Christ, who are famil- 
iar with my message. I hope that the good God who has 
let me give this message here will let me give it elsewhere, 
to men and women who do not know it as well as you know 
it, who have not heard it as often as you have heard it, 
and to whom it will be more news than it is to you. If I 
could only think that all the world were facing toward God 
and trying to climb toward Him, how easy would be the 
message ! but they are not. I see this one supreme Lord 
and Master, with His infinite, unfailing, patient love, coming 
into the world, and I look to see all men run to Him, saying, 
You are the one for whom we have been looking. I look 
to see them crown Him with flowers, and greet Him with 
palm-branches in their hands, crying, Hosanna to Him that 



A CONFESSION OF FAITH. 313 

cometh in the name of the Lord ! But, behold, the crown 
on His brow is a crown of thorns, and his scepter is a spear 
thrust into his side. Because they did not understand 
Him? The better they understood Him the more they 
hated Him. He chose twelve. They did not understand 
Him very well. The eleven, as they came to understand 
Him better, loved Him more ; but Judas Iscariot, when he 
came to understand what Christ meant, what sacrifice, what 
self-abnegation, what surrender of one's self for the sake of 
others — Judas Iscariot hated Him. He did not want such 
a Lord and Master. When Caiaphas understood that 
Christ meant driving the traders out of the temple, abol- 
ishing the corrupt market-place, interfering with what he 
called his vested rights, abolishing the corruption by which 
he grew rich, Caiaphas said. The better I understand this 
man the more I hate Him. Shall I lose my place, my 
power, my position, my salary, for Him ? Crucify Him ! 
When Pilate came to understand Him, and to see that to 
stand by Him bravely hazarded his office and perhaps even 
his life, he said, I will have none of Him ; let Him be 
crucified. The centurion did not hate Christ, but he was 
appointed to put Christ to death, and did it, arguing, I am 
not responsible ; I only do what I am commanded. It was 
so then ; it has been so ever since. For when love and 
justice and truth come into the world, hate and injustice 
and falsehood league themselves together to do it battle. 
The story of that passion week has been repeated through- 
out the ages. Still Judas Iscariot is betraying Christ ; still 
Caiaphas is trying to destroy Him ; still cowardly Pilate is 
saying, I would like to save Him if I could, but I would 
rather let Him be crucified than hazard my own fortunes. 
Still the centurion says, It is wrong, but it is none of my 
business. I meet Judas and Caiaphas and IMkitc and the 
centurion every day. One man says. It is wrong to bribe a 



314 A CONFESSION OF FAITH. 

legislature ; but if I have either to bribe a legislature or let 
my corporation suffer for lack of legislative support, I will 
bribe. This is Pilate. The ecclesiastic says, I would like 
to preach the truth ; but if the truth is going to injure the 
church, I dare not preach it. This is Caiaphas. The 
official says, I do not like this business to which I am as- 
signed ; but I am not responsible. This is the centurion. 
They are all here. Christ calls us not only to a pilgrimage, 
but to a battle for truth. We are not merely a band of 
pilgrims, we are an army, if indeed we understand the 
Christ who says. Let him that hath no sword sell his gar- 
ment and buy one. 

I wish I could believe with Browning that evil is only 
good in the making. I wish I could think that all men 
are as good as I wish all men were. Perhaps if I did not 
know myself, I might think so. But I see this battle be- 
tween goodness and vice, truth and falsehood, sensuality 
and purity, not only in the world without, but in the world 
within. I am the seventh of Romans, not yet graduated. 
All my victories come after a battle, all my uprisings come 
out of struggle, and I am set against myself. Pilate in me 
sometimes says. You dare not ; Caiaphas in me sometimes 
says. Take care of your institution ; the centurion in me 
sometimes says. That is none of your business. 

So, seeing Christ in His world, that is, God in His world 
of men, not only calling them to follow him, but also set- 
ting the divine forces against the forces of corruption, sen- 
suality, vice, pride, hypocrisy, false pretense, what men call 
vested interests, but I call vested wrongs, I wonder how 
God will direct this battle, what cohorts of heaven will He 
summon, what strength will He put forth to quell the wrong ; 
and, looking to the life of Him whom I believe to be God 
manifest in flesh, I see that He conquers wrong by not re- 
sisting it. He rebukes it ; but when it assaults Himself, He 



A CONFESSION OF FAITH. 315 

conquers wrong by suffering wrong ; conquers hate, not by 
force, but by love ; conquers falsehood, not by violence, 
but by truth ; conquers the malignant forces of men by 
sacrifice of Himself. 

I cannot believe that one member of the Godhead suf- 
fered and died to appease the wrath of another member of 
the Godhead, that men might be forgiven. I never be- 
lieved that. I once did beHeve that God's laws must be en- 
forced by penalty, and in order that God might remit the 
penalty it was necessary that some one should suffer it. I 
used to believe that God was bound by His own laws, and 
Christ by His sacrifice cut the bonds. I believe that no 
more. And I certainly cannot believe that Jesus Christ 
came to the earth and suffered and died to produce a 
moral impression on mankind. If I thought that Christ 
suffered and died to produce a moral impression on me, it 
would not produce a moral impression on me. The 
thought that He was dying for the purpose of producing that 
impression would destroy the impression. No ; Calvary is 
not a spectacular drama enacted before the world to bring 
tears to men's eyes. Shall I then eliminate sacrifice alto- 
gether from the New Testament, or think it can be elim- 
inated from human life? It runs throughout history. It 
begins with the lowest germ which cannot give forth life 
without dividing itself, and runs up into motherhood which 
gives life through pangs and travail pains. To discard 
sacrifice is to discard the teaching not only of the Bible but 
of life itself. The sacrifice of Christ is of the very essence 
of Christianity ; but sacrifice is not a condition of God's 
forgiveness, it is the method by whicli he forgives ; it is the 
method by which he pours his life into men, that they may 
live. A boy has been wild; his father has made rules, 
and he has broken over them ; his mother has (oiinsclod, 
and he has disregarded the counsel. One night ho comes 



3l6 A CONFESSION OF FAITH. 

staggering past his mother's door; and as he goes, he hears 
a voice broken with sobs, and stops and Hstens, and hears 
the mother's prayers for the boy she loves and can do 
nothing for, and he goes to his room sobered by his 
mother's sorrow. But if she had w^atched for his home- 
coming, and timed her tears to arrest his attention, they 
would have moved him only to scorn. I imagine philoso- 
phers gathered about her to discuss the reason of her grief. 
One says. It is that she may move the heart of the father, 
and appease his wrath, and win for her boy one more 
chance; a second says. It is because whatsoever a man 
soweth he must reap, and the boy has sown bitter seed and 
she is trying by her sorrow to save him from a bitter har- 
vest ; a third says, She is praying and weeping that she 
may move him to repentance. But she looks up through 
her tears with wonder, saying, If you understood a mother's 
heart you w^ould know why she weeps when her boy goes 
staggering up-stairs from a drunken debauch. Through 
Christ's sacrifice I see the heart of God suffering so long 
as there is sin and suffering in the world. I see no 
theatric exhibition ; no plan of salvation ; no scheme con- 
trived ; I see the heart of the Almighty eternally kind. 

Men talk of suffering love. There is no love that is not 
suffering love so long as the loved one suffers. There is no 
love that is not suffering love so long as the loved one sins. 
" He was made sin for us who knew no sin." Do you not 
know what that means ? Do you not know that this country 
never could have been retrieved from slavery if there had 
not been men who hated slavery, men who never owned a 
slave, and yet who felt slavery as their own sin because it 
was the sin of their nation ? Have you never had a friend 
whose sin has burned into your heart as though it were your 
own? Have you never felt shame for another? Has re- 
morse never touched you for a sin that was not yours ? Some 



A CONFESSION OF FAITH. 31/ 

of you have said to me, Why cannot you continue to preach 
Sunday mornings, and throw the pastoral burdens off? 
Preach, but do not take upon yourself the burdens and sor- 
rows and problems of individuals. Simply come Sunday 
morning and preach to us. Do you suppose I could? 
Could I preach to sorrowing ones if I did not enter into 
their sorrows? Could I preach to doubting and skeptical 
ones if their own doubts did not reawaken doubts in me ? 
Could I speak words that would help a struggling sinner if 
his sin had not come into my own life, and I did not feel it 
as though it were my own? No pastor can preach who 
does not suffer with his people and for his people ; and 
through my poor, feeble experience I see the great his- 
toric truth that God bears the sins and the sorrows and the 
burdens of his ignorant and unworthy children, and helps 
them by bearing their burdens for them. The sacrifice of 
Christ is the father having compassion on his son and com- 
ing out to meet him. 

The religion, then, that I have tried to preach to you has 
been something more than theology or ritualism or ethical 
rules of conduct. Clear thinking is desirable, but thinking 
about religion is not rehgion. Ordered public worship is 
desirable, but ordered public worship is not religion; it 
only ministers to it. Trying to do righteously to your 
neighbor comes nearer to being religion ; but it is not very 
profound religion. Religion — that is, the Christian relig- 
ion — seems to me to be this : Hearing this Christ call and 
trying to follow Him ; catching the spirit of this Christ and 
trying to reproduce it; seeing that there are other people 
who do not know Him as well as you know Him yourself, 
and trying to communicate Him to others; and doing this 
by the lips, and doing it by the life. Religion is not be- 
lieving some statements about God, it is living the divine 
life in the world. Religion, therefore, means, to tlie nK\nu- 



3l8 A CONFESSION OF FAITH. 

facturer, divine participation in the work of God*s creation ; 
to the merchant, participation in the divine vi^ork of distri- 
bution of comfort and well-being ; to the lawyer, the min- 
istry of justice, which is God's own attribute j to the doc- 
tor, healing, health-giving, which Christ also did on earth; 
to the teacher, unveihng the hidden truth to the eyes of 
men; to the mother and to the father, translating into 
terms that little children can understand the fatherhood of 
God and the motherhood of God. Religion is life, and 
life is love, and love is God ; and the Christian religion is 
God in human life. 

J!t is not all individual ; it is also social. Christ brings 
men and women together in one household of faith. He does 
not ask that they think alike ; nor that they worship alike ; 
nor that they act alike ; but that they love ahke. Some of 
my brethren in the ministry say that we must be grounded 
in our creeds ; but when I turn to the New Testament, 
what I find is, ^^ rooted and grounded in love," not in 
creed. The bond that binds us all together and makes us 
one great brotherhood is love, which is the bond of per- 
fectness. 

If there is any one topic on which I have spoken in this 
church, on which more of the members of this church have 
dissented from my views than on any other, it is the social 
topic. I have no overweening confidence in any methods 
of social reform which I have advocated in the past or hold 
to in the present ; but of one thing I am perfectly sure — 
that we are coming into the age in which, more and more, 
Christianity means Christian brotherhood. It means 
Christian unity in the Church ; it means Christian democ- 
racy in the Nation ; it means an international brotherhood, 
in which all the nations of the earth shall have a part ; it 
means fellowship, communion, a common life. The world 
will not be redeemed by a tariff nor by the abolition of 



A CONFESSION OF FAITH. 319 

tariffs, by a personal tax nor by the abolition of personal 
taxes, by levying everything on the land nor by levying noth- 
ing on the land ; it will not be redeemed by socialism nor 
by individualism ; it will not be redeemed by the Republi- 
can party nor by the Democratic party, nor by the Prohibi- 
tion party. It will be redeemed only when we come to 
understand that because we have one Father in heaven we 
are all brethren ; and the rich brother will see in the poor 
a brother, and the strong will see in the weak a brother, and 
the competent will see in the incompetent a brother, and the 
pure minded and the developed will see in the impure and 
undeveloped a brother ; and the Christian church will do 
what Christ did — not say, I will care for the worthy poor, 
but also. Give me the unworthy poor, what can I do for 
them? For to be a Christian is to bear one another's 
burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ. Religion is not a 
narrow gate through which a single individual can slip into 
a state of bliss and leave the rest of the world outside. If 
it were, I would not want it. I would rather stay where 
men are in sorrow and in struggle, in poverty and in need, 
and share their sorrow and their suffering with them, than 
escape alone on a life-line and leave the rest to perish. 

Something like this has been my message. I have 
preached many sermons, but I think they have all been in- 
cluded in this : That we are the sons of God ; that Jesus 
Christ is God in the flesh, come to tell us who God is, and 
what we are to be ; that to bring the world to know God 
we are to take up our cross and follow Him, and Hve and 
love and serve and suffer as He did ; and through that min- 
istry of love and service and sacrifice the workl will at last 
be made one great brotherhood, looking up to one Father 
and one Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 

I am sorry to leave Brooklyn, which has been my home 
for these last eleven years and more ; I am still more sorry 



320 A CONFESSION OF FAITH. 

to leave PhTQOUth Church pulpit and Plymouth Church, 
which has filled me with its love, inspired me w4th its hope, 
and helped to clarif\' my \-ision with its faith ; I am most of 
all sorry to leave the pastorate, to which I never expect to 
return. But I hope, as long as God gives me breath to 
speak and heart to feel, to tell my feUow-men by pen and 
voice, what I have tried to tell you this morning — that God 
is love and life is love, and Christ is the revelation of both ; 
and when the eyes grow dim and are closed, and the lips 
stammer and cease to speak, and the pulses stop their 
beating, still I hope, from some other sphere, unhampered 
by sin, unhindered by the body, to go on, in some other 
way, as God shall give me grace, to repeat that message, 
which then I shall understand better than I do now — that 
God is love, and life is love, and Christ is the revelation of 
love and life and God. 



^l 



It 



